YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL - thecommonlife.com · Your God Is Too Small J.B.Phillips No one is ever really at ease in facing what we call “life” and “death” without a religious

Your God Is Too Small

J.B.Phillips

No one is ever really at ease in facing what we call “life” and “death” without a

religious faith. The trouble with many people today is that they have not found

a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown

in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the

point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas

of God have remained largely static.

It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that

exists in the mind of a child of Sunday-school age, unless he is prepared to

deny his own experience of life. If, by a great effort of will, he does do this he

will always be secretly afraid lest some new truth may expose the juvenility of

his faith. And it will always be by such an effort that he either worships or

serves a God who is really too small to command his adult loyalty and co-

operation.

It often appears to those outside the Churches that this is precisely the

attitude of Christian people. If they are not strenuously defending an outgrown

conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only

exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church.

Therefore to join in with the worship of a Church would be to become a party

to a piece of mass-hypocrisy and to buy a sense of security at the price of the

sense of truth, and many men of goodwill will not consent to such a

transaction.

It cannot be denied that there is a little truth in this criticism. There are

undoubtedly professing Christians with childish conceptions of God which

could not stand up to the winds of real life for five minutes. But Christians are

Your God is Too Small 2

by no means always unintelligent, naive, or immature. Many of them hold a

faith in God that has been both purged and developed by the strains and

perplexities of modern times, as well as by a small but by no means negligible

direct experience of God Himself. They have seen enough to know that God is

immeasurably “bigger” than our forefathers imagined, and modern scientific

discovery only confirms their belief that man has only just begun to

comprehend the incredibly complex Being who is behind what we call “life.”

Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction,

without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked

or selfish or, as the old-fashioned would say, “godless,” but because they

have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to “account for” life,

big enough to “fit in with” the new scientific age, big enough to command their

highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation.

It is the purpose of this book to attempt two things: first to expose the

inadequate conceptions of God which still linger unconsciously in many minds,

and which prevent our catching a glimpse of the true God; and secondly to

suggest ways in which we can find the real God for ourselves. If it is true that

there is Someone in charge of the whole mystery of life and death, we can

hardly expect to escape a sense of futility and frustration until we begin to see

what He is like and what His purposes are.

Unreal Gods

RESIDENT POLICEMAN

To many people, conscience is almost all that they have by way of knowledge

of God. This still, small voice which makes them feel guilty and unhappy

before, during, or after doing something wrong, is God speaking to them. It is

this which, to some extent at least, controls their conduct. It is this which

impels them to shoulder the irksome duty and choose the harder path. Now no


serious advocate of a real adult religion would deny the function of

conscience, or deny that its voice may at least give some inkling of the moral

order that lies behind the obvious world in which we live. Yet to make

conscience into God is a highly dangerous thing to do. For one thing, as we

shall see in a moment, conscience is by no means an infallible guide; and for

another it is extremely unlikely that we shall ever be moved to worship, love,

and serve a nagging inner voice that at worst spoils our pleasure and at best

keeps us rather negatively on the path of virtue.

Conscience can be so easily perverted or morbidly developed in the sensitive

person, and so easily ignored and silenced by the insensitive, that it makes a

very unsatisfactory god. For while it is probably true that every normal person

has an embryo moral sense by which he can distinguish right from wrong, the

development, non-development, or perversion of that sense is largely a

question of upbringing, training, and propaganda.

As an example of the first, we may suppose a child to be brought up by

extremely strict vegetarian parents. If the child, now grown adolescent,

attempts to eat meat, he will in all probability suffer an extremely bad attack of

“conscience.” If he is brought up to regard certain legitimate pleasures as

“worldly” and reprehensible, he will similarly suffer pangs of conscience if he

seeks the forbidden springs of recreation. The voice will no doubt sound like

the voice of God; but it is only the voice of the early upbringing which has

conditioned his moral sense.

As an example of the second influence on the moral sense, we may take a

“sportsman” who has been trained from his youth that it is “wrong” to shoot a

sitting bird. Should he do so, even accidentally, he will undoubtedly feel a

sense of shame and wrong-doing; though to shoot a bird flying twenty yards in

front of the muzzle of his gun will not produce any sense of guilt. His

conscience has been artificially trained, and it is thus that “taboos” are

maintained among the civilized and uncivilized alike.


Any sport, and indeed many professions, can provide abundant instances of

the moral sense trained to feel that certain things are “not done.” The feeling

of guilt and failure produced by doing the forbidden thing may be quite false,

and is in many cases quite disproportionate to the actual moral wrong, if

indeed there be any. As an example of the third way in which the moral sense

may be conditioned, we may take the way in which public propaganda

influenced those of sensitive conscience during the last world war. It was

perfectly possible for an extreme sense of guilt to be aroused if paper were

burned (because propaganda had said that it should be salvaged), or if a

journey by rail were undertaken (did not propaganda shout on every hand, “Is

your journey really necessary?”).

In Nazi Germany, of course, propaganda as a weapon to pervert the moral

sense became a fine art. It soon seemed, for example, a positive duty to hate

the Jews, and a good Nazi would doubtless have suffered pangs of

conscience if he had been kind to one of the despised race.

These examples may be enough to show the unwisdom of calling conscience,

God. Obviously this invaluable moral sense can be rightly trained and even

rightly influenced by propaganda, provided we can be sure what we mean by

right. But to define that word we need to discover God—for without God, no

one has any authority to advance in support of his ideas of “right,” except his

own moral sense. Unless there is a God by whom “right” and “wrong” can be

reliably assessed, moral judgments can be no more than opinion, influenced

by upbringing. training, and propaganda.

In this country of England, centuries of Christian tradition have so permeated

our life that we forget how our moral sense has been conditioned by a dilute,

but genuine, Christianity. Our attitude toward women and children, toward the

weak and helpless, or toward animals, for instance, is not nearly so “innate”

as we think. It was a shock to many men of our armed forces who were


stationed abroad during the last war to discover how poor and blind was the

moral sense in these directions in countries which had no Christian tradition.

No doubt many put this down to the fact that the inhabitants of these countries

had the misfortune not to be English! It would be truer to say that they had

had the misfortune not to have had their moral sense stimulated and

developed by Christian upbringing, training, and propaganda.

Many moralists, both Christian and non-Christian, have pointed out the decline

in our moral sense observed in recent years. It is at least arguable that this is

almost wholly due to the decline in the first-hand absorption of Christian

ideals. True Christianity has never had a serious rival in the training of the

moral sense which exists in ordinary people.

Yet there are many, even among professing Christians, who are made

miserable by a morbidly developed conscience, which they quite wrongly

consider to be the voice of God. Many a housewife overdrives herself to

please some inner voice that demands perfection. The voice may be her own

demands or the relics of childhood training, but it certainly is not likely to be

the voice of the Power behind the Universe.

On the other hand, the middle-aged business man who has long ago taught

his conscience to come to heel may persuade himself that he is a good-living

man. He may even say, with some pride, that he would never do anything

against his conscience. But it is impossible to believe that the feeble voice of

the half-blind thing which he calls a conscience is in any real sense the voice

of God.

Surely, neither the hectically over-developed nor the falsely-trained, nor the

moribund conscience can ever be regarded as God, or even part of Him. For if

it is, God can be made to appear to the sensitive an over-exacting tyrant, and

to the insensitive a comfortable accommodating “Voice Within” which would

never interfere with a man’s pleasure.


PARENTAL HANGOVER

Many psychologists assure us that the trend of the whole of a man’s life is

largely determined by his attitude in early years toward his parents. Many

normal people, with happy childhoods behind them, may scoff at this, but

nevertheless the clinics and consulting-rooms of psychiatrists are thronged

with those whose inner lives were distorted in early childhood by their

relationship toward their parents. Quite a lot of ordinary people, who would

never dream of turning to psychiatry, nevertheless have an abnormal fear of

authority, or of a dominating personality of either sex, which could without

much difficulty be traced back to the tyranny of a parent. Conversely there are

many who would be insulted by the name “neurotic,” but who nevertheless are

imperfectly adjusted to life, and whose inner sense of superiority makes them

difficult to work or live with. It would again not be difficult to trace in their

history a childhood of spoiling and indulgence, in which the child’s natural self-

love was never checked or directed outward into interest in other people. The

child is truly “the father of the man.”

But what has this to do with an inadequate conception of God? This, that the

early conception of God is almost invariably founded upon the child’s idea of

his father. If he is lucky enough to have a good father this is all to the good,

provided of course that the conception of God grows with the rest of

personality. But if the child is afraid (or, worse still, afraid and feeling guilty

because he IS afraid) of his own father, the chances are that his Father in

Heaven will appear to him a fearful Being. Again, if he is lucky, he will outgrow

this conception, and indeed differentiate between his early “fearful” idea and

his later mature conception. But many are not able to outgrow the sense of

guilt and fear, and in adult years are still obsessed with it, although it has

actually nothing to do with their real relationship with the living God. It is

nothing more than a parental hangover. Many priests and ministers with some

knowledge of psychology will have met the person abnormally afraid of God,


and will have been able to recognize the psychological, rather than the

religious, significance of the fear. Some of them will have had the joy of

seeing the religious faith blossom out into joy and confidence, when the

psychological disharmony has been analyzed and resolved. To describe that

process would be outside the scope of this book, but it is worth observing for

the sake of those who may possibly suffer from an irrational fear of, or violent

revolt from, the idea of God that the root of their trouble is probably not their

“sin” or their “rebelliousness,” but what they felt toward their parents when

they were very young.

It is interesting, though rather pathetic, to note here that the success of a

certain type of Christianity depends almost wholly on this sense of guilt. For

the “gospel” will be accepted only by those in whom the sense of guilt can be

readily awakened or stimulated. Indeed, missioners of this type of Christianity

(flying incidentally in the face of Christ’s own example) will go all out to induce

and foster “conviction of sin” in their hearers. The results of such efforts are

usually small, a fact attributed by the missioner to the hardness of the hearts

of his hearers. It is really due to the healthy reaction against artificial guilt-

injection possessed by all but those few whose unhappy childhood has left

them peculiarly open to this form of spiritual assault.

This, of course, is not to deny the fact of human sin or the necessity of divine

forgiveness. There is a real “conviction of sin” which is quite different in quality

from that produced by high-pressure evangelism. These matters must be

considered further in a later chapter. What we are concerned in establishing

here is that the conception of God which is based upon a fear-relationship in

childhood is not a satisfactory foundation for an adult Christianity. Much of the

fear of God which characterized an earlier generation was the fruit of fear of

parents, and it was not difficult to arouse a sense of sinfulness or fear of hell

in those whose childhood was highly coloured by memories of guilt, shame,

and the fear of punishment.


So firmly established in the minds of some non-Christian psychologists is this

connection between the father-image of early childhood and the later

conception of God, that they will go so far as to say that all religion is

regressive, that is, an attempt to return to the dependence of childhood by

clinging to the idea of a parent. It can hardly be denied that this is true in

some cases, but it is manifestly nonsense in the case of some of the greatest

and maturest personalities that the world has seen who have held a firm belief

in a Personal God. Moreover it is the experience of Christians who have been

“psychoanalyzed” that, although the process disentangles from their faith

something that is childish and even sentimental, yet there remains a hard core

of thoroughly satisfactory adult conviction and faith.

But surely, it may be objected, Christ Himself taught us to regard God as a

Father. Are we to reject His own analogy? Of course not, so long as we

remember that it IS an analogy. When Christ taught His disciples to regard

God as their Father in Heaven He did not mean that their idea of God must

necessarily be based upon their ideas of their own fathers. For all we know

there may have been many of His hearers whose fathers were unjust,

tyrannical, stupid, conceited, feckless, or indulgent. It is the RELATIONSHIP

that Christ is stressing. The intimate love for, and interest in, his son

possessed by a good earthly father represents to men a relationship that they

can understand, even if they themselves are fatherless! The same sort of

relationship, Christ is saying, can be reliably reckoned upon by man in his

dealings with God.

There are Christians who do not appear to understand this properly. Because

Christ said that men must become “as little children” (i.e., repudiate all the

sham, compromise, and cynicism of adulthood) before they could play their

part in His Kingdom with simplicity and sincerity, some have supposed that He

places a premium upon human immaturity. It is ludicrous to suppose that any

sensible God can wish adult men and women to crawl about in spiritual

rompers in order to preserve a rather sentimental Father-child relationship.


Indeed, experience shows that it is only the mature Christian man who can

begin to see a little of the “size” of his Father. He may previously have thought

that the comparison of the relationship between the toddler and his grown-up

father with his own relationship toward God was rather an exaggeration of the

gulf, in intelligence at least. But in his growing maturity he is likely to see that

Christ, in His kindness of heart, has certainly not exaggerated the awe-

inspiring disparity between man and God.

To have a God, then, who is as much, or more, our superior than we are the

superior of an infant child crawling on the hearthrug, is not to hold a childish

concept of God, but rather the reverse. It is only when we limit the mind’s

stirrings after its Maker by imposing upon it half-forgotten images of our own

earthly parents, that we grow frustrated in spirit and wonder why for us the

springs of worship and love do not flow. We must leave behind “parental

hangover” if we are to find a “big enough” God.

GRAND OLD MAN

It is said that some Sunday School children were once asked to write down

the ideas as to what God was like. The answers, with few exceptions, began

something like this: “God is a very old gentleman living in Heaven ...”!

Whether this story is true or not, there is no doubt that in many children’s

minds God is an “old” person. This is partly due, of course, to the fact that a

child’s superiors are always “old” to him and God must therefore be the

“oldest” of all. Moreover, a child is so frequently told that he will be able to do

such-and-such a thing or understand such-and-such a matter “when he is

older,” that it is only natural that the Source of all strength and wisdom must

seem to him very old indeed. In addition to this his mind has quite probably

been filled with stories of God’s activities which happened “long ago.” He is in

consequence quite likely to feel, and even visualize, God as someone very

old. It may be argued that there is no particular harm in this. Since the child

must adapt himself to an adult world, there can be nothing wrong in his


concept of an “old” God. But there is nevertheless a very real danger that the

child will imagine this God not merely as “old,” but as “old-fashioned”; and

may indeed be so impressed with God’s actions in “times of old” that he may

fail to grasp the idea of God operating with unimpaired energy in the present

and leading forward into a hopeful future.

But even if it be admitted that to visualize God as “old” will do a child no harm,

the persistence of the idea of childhood beneath the surface of the mind may

well make it difficult to develop and hold an adequate idea of God in later

years. In order to test whether this “old-fashioned” concept was persisting in

modern young people, a simple psychological test was recently applied to a

mixed group of older adolescents. They were asked to answer, without

reflection, the question: “Do you think God understands radar?” In nearly

every case the reply was “No,” followed of course by a laugh, as the

conscious mind realized the absurdity of the answer. But, simple as this test

was, it was quite enough to show that AT THE BACK OF THEIR MINDS these

youngsters held an idea of God quite inadequate for modern days.

Subsequent discussion showed plainly that while “they had not really thought

much about it,” they had freely to admit that the idea of God, absorbed some

years before, existed in quite a separate compartment from their modern

experience, knowledge, and outlook. It was as though they were revering the

memory of a Grand Old Man, who was a great power in His day, but who

could not possibly be expected to keep pace with modern progress!

There are probably many people today with a similar “split” in their mental

conceptions. The “Grand Old Man” is treated with reverence and respect—

look what a help He was to our forefathers!—but He can hardly be expected to

cope with the complexities and problems of life today! If the absurdity of this

“split” makes us laugh, so much the better.

There is much in our Churches and religious teaching generally that tends to

encourage the “old-fashioned” concept. The Bible is read in beautiful but old-


fashioned language, as a rule. Our services are often entirely conducted in a

form of language that no one uses today. We address God in our prayers in

the archaic second person singular—and these prayers themselves often give

the impression of being cast in a form that the Grand Old Man can both

understand and approve. Our hymns, with some notable exceptions, often

express a Victorian and very rarely a “big enough” idea of God. To appreciate

their true value they should be read aloud in cold blood and dissociated from

the well loved tunes. At baptism, matrimony, and burial, we continue to use

language which ordinary people can hardly understand, but which they feel

vaguely is old-fashioned and out of touch with their actual lives. They respect

the Grand Old Man and His peculiarities, but they feel no inclination to

worship Him as the living God.

Sermons and addresses again and again are stuffed with religious jargon and

technical terms which strike no answering chord in the modern heart. It is no

doubt a joy to the preacher to know that he is not only serving the same God

as the saints of the past, but even using the time-honoured phrases which

meant so much to them. But to his modern hearers (if they can be got within

earshot!) he will only seem to be in love with the past. His words may have

beauty and dignity, but it is the beauty and dignity of a past age; and his

message often appears to be wholly irrelevant to the issues of today.

Where people have been “conditioned” by a Christian upbringing, the worship

of the average Church may to some extent satisfy. In all probability they are,

through long practice, “translating” as they go along. But to the average young

person of today, brought up without such background, conventional Christian

worship will appear reactionary and old-fashioned, and such ideas of God as

may be stimulated in his mind will be of the Grand-Old-Man type. His

pressing, though inarticulate, need is not for the God of the ancient Hebrews,

nor the God of the early Church, nor the God of Victorian England, but the

God of the Atomic Age—the God of Energy and Wisdom and Love TODAY.


Clever people often scathingly criticize the youth of today for having “no

historic sense.” But surely that is hardly to be wondered at. So great and far-

reaching have been the changes in modern life that the young man of today

cannot see any but the slenderest connection between what appears to him

the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation and the highly-complex

fast-moving life of the world today. The historic sense is often the fruit of

maturity, and while an experienced Christian may be glad to think that he is

worshipping the same God as did Abraham, Moses, David, and the saints of

the Christian Church, the young man of today, even if he knows who

Abraham, Moses, and David were, will be quite unmoved by the historical

connection. His clamant need for an adequate God of Today; the historic

sense may well come later.

It will be necessary, as we shall see in a later chapter, to look back into

human history at the actual events which are the foundation of the Christian

view of God. But it will be just as necessary to return, armed with the essential

historical facts, to the modern world. No figure in history, however splendid

and memorable, can possible satisfy the mind which is seeking the living

contemporary God.

MEEK-AND-MILD

It is a thousand pities that the word “child” has so few words that rhyme with it

appropriate for a hymn. But for this paucity of language we might have been

spared the couplet that hundreds of thousands must have learned in their

childhood:

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

Look upon a little child.


But perhaps it was not the stringencies of verse-making that led the writer to

apply the word “mild” to Jesus Christ, for here it is in another children’s hymn

and this time at the beginning of the line:

Christian children all must be Mild, obedient, good as He.

Why “MILD”? Of all the epithets that could be applied to Christ, this seems

one of the least appropriate. For what does “mild,” as applied to a person,

conjure up to our minds? Surely a picture of someone who wouldn’t say “boo”

to the proverbial goose; someone who would let sleeping dogs lie and avoid

trouble wherever possible; someone of a placid temperament who is almost a

stranger to the passions of red-blooded humanity; someone who is a bit of a

nonentity, both uninspired and uninspiring.

This word “mild” is apparently deliberately used to describe a man who did not

hesitate to challenge and expose the hypocrisies of the religious people of his

day: a man who had such “personality” that He walked unscathed through a

murderous crowd; a man so far from being a nonentity that He was regarded

by the authorities as a public danger; a man who could be moved to violent

anger by shameless exploitation or by smug complacent orthodoxy; a man of

such courage that He deliberately walked to what He knew would mean death,

despite the earnest pleas of well-meaning friends! Mild! What a word to use

for a personality whose challenge and strange attractiveness nineteen

centuries have by no means exhausted. Jesus Christ might well be called

“meek,” in the sense of being selfless and humble and utterly devoted to what

He considered right, whatever the personal cost; but “mild,” never! Yet it is this

fatal combination of “meek and mild” which has been so often, and is even

now, applied to Him. We can hardly be surprised if children feel fairly soon

that they have outgrown the “tender Shepherd” and find their heroes

elsewhere.


But if the impression of a soft and sentimental Jesus has been made

(supported, alas, all to often by sugary hymns and pretty religious pictures),

the harm is not over when the adolescent rejects the soft and childish

conception. There will probably linger at the back of his mind an idea that

Christ and the Christian religion is a soft and sentimental thing which has

nothing to do with the workaday world. For there is no doubt that this

particular “inadequate god,” the mild and soft and sentimental, still exists in

many adult minds. Indeed the very word “Jesus” conjures up to many people a

certain embarrassing sweet tenderness (which incidentally could easily be put

in its proper place by an intelligent adult reading of the Gospels). The appeal

of this sickly-sweet figure, or of those whose methods are founded on such a

concept, is rightly regarded by normal people as “below the belt.” But in fact

there is no connection between what has been rudely called the “creeping-

Jesus” method and the life and character of the real Christ. The real beauty,

love, and tenderness of Christ’s character are not, of course, being denied or

minimized, but when one characteristic is caricatured at the expense of all the

others, we get a grotesque distortion which can only appeal to the morbidly

sentimental.

The danger of the “meek-and-mild” idea is two-fold. First, since Christians

believe that the character of Christ is an accurate depiction in time and space

of the character of the Eternal Deity, it is apt to lead to a conception of God

that is woolly and sentimental. We shall have more to say of this in a later

chapter, and we will merely point out here the impossibility of a mature adult’s

feeling constrained to worship a god whose emotional equipment is less

developed than his own. The second danger is that since it is axiomatic with

Christians that God is love, this most terrible and beautiful of all the virtues

becomes debased and cheapened.

It would seem that the “meek-and-mild” conception of the Deity could be

readily seen through, yet experience shows that it is operating beneath the

conscious level of many Christian minds, particularly in those whose childhood


has been coloured by a sentimental attitude toward “the Lord Jesus.” Such

people find their actions, and even their thoughts, inhibited by a false

consideration of what is “loving.” They can neither use their critical faculties

nor speak the plain truth nor meet their fellows “naturally” for fear they sin

against the meek-and-mild god. To non-Christians they thus appear unreal or

even as hypocrites, while the “love” they attempt to exhibit toward others is all

too often a pathetic travesty of the real thing. For, like other sentimentalists,

the meek-and-mild god is in reality cruel; and those whose lives have been

governed by him from early childhood have never been allowed to develop

their real selves. Forced to be “loving,” they have never been free to love.

There is a further offshoot of the worship of this false god which must be

mentioned. It is the sentimental Christian ideal of “saintliness.” We hear, or

read, of someone who was “a real saint: he never saw any harm in anyone

and never spoke a word against anyone all his life.” If this really is a Christian

saintliness, then Jesus Christ was no saint. It is true that He taught men not to

sit in judgment upon one another, but He never suggested that they should

turn a blind eye to evil or pretend that other people were faultless. He Himself

indulged no roseate visions of human nature: He “knew what was in man,” as

St. John tersely puts it. Nor can we imagine Him either using or advocating the

invariable use of “loving” words. To speak the truth was obviously to Him more

important than to make His hearers comfortable: though, equally obviously,

His genuine love for men gave Him tact, wisdom, and sympathy. He was Love

in action, but He was not meek and mild.

ABSOLUTE PERFECTION

Of all the false gods there is probably no greater nuisance in the spiritual

world than the “god of one hundred per cent.” For he is plausible. It can so

easily be argued that since God is Perfection, and since He asks the complete

loyalty of His creatures, then the best way of serving, pleasing, and

worshipping Him is to set up absolute one-hundred-per-cent standards and


see to it that we obey them. After all, did not Christ say, “Be ye perfect”? This

one-hundred-per-cent standard is a real menace to Christians of various

schools of thought, and has led quite a number of sensitive, conscientious

people to what is popularly called a “nervous breakdown.” And it has taken the

joy and spontaneity out of the Christian lives of many more who dimly realize

that what was meant to be a life of “perfect freedom” has become an anxious

slavery.

It is probably only people of certain backgrounds and temperaments who will

find the “one-hundred-per-cent god” a terrible tyrant. A young athletic extrovert

may talk glibly enough of being “one-hundred-per-cent pure, honest, loving,

and unselfish.” But being what he is, he hasn’t the faintest conception of what

“one hundred per cent” means. He has neither the mental equipment nor the

imagination to begin to grasp what perfection really is. He is not the type to

analyze his own motives, or build up an artificial conscience to supervise his

own actions, or be confronted by a terrifying mental picture of what one-

hundred-per-cent perfection literally means in relation to his own life and

effort. What HE means by “one-hundred-per-cent pure, honest, etc.” is just as

pure and honest as he sincerely knows how. And that is a very different

matter.

But the conscientious, sensitive, imaginative person who is somewhat lacking

in self-confidence and inclined to introspection, will find one hundred percent

perfection truly terrifying. The more he thinks of it as God’s demand, the more

guilty and miserable he will become, and he cannot see any way out of his

impasse. If he reduces the one hundred per cent, he is betraying his own

spiritual vision, and the very God who might have helped him is the Author (so

he imagines) of the terrific demands! No wonder he often “breaks down.” The

tragedy is often that the “one-hundred-per-cent god” is introduced into the life

of the sensitive by the comparatively insensitive, who literally cannot imagine

the harm they are doing. What is the way out? The words of Christ, “Learn of

Me,” provide the best clue. Some of our modern enthusiastic Christians of the


hearty type tend to regard Christianity as a performance. But it still is, as it

was originally, a way of living, and in no sense a performance acted for the

benefit of the surrounding world. To “learn” implies growth; implies the making

and correcting of mistakes; implies a steady upward progress toward an ideal.

The “perfection” to which Christ commands men to progress is this ideal. The

modern high-pressure Christian of certain circles would like to impose

perfection of one hundred per cent as a set of rules to be immediately

enforced, instead of as a shining ideal to be faithfully pursued. His short cut, in

effect, makes the unimaginative satisfied before he ought to be and drives the

imaginative to despair. Such a distortion of Christian truth could not possible

originate from the One who said His “yoke was easy” and His “burden light,”

nor by His follower St. Paul, who declared after many years’ experience that

he “pressed toward the mark not as though he had already attained or were

already perfect.”

Yet even to people who have not been driven to distraction by “one-hundred-

per-cent” Christianity, the same fantasy of perfection may be masquerading in

their minds as God. Because it is a fantasy, it produces paralysis and a sense

of frustration. The true ideal, as we shall see later, stimulates, encourages,

and produces likeness to itself.

If we believe in God, we must naturally believe that He is Perfection. But we

must not think, to speak colloquially, that He cannot therefore be interested in

anything less than perfection. (If that were so, the human race would be in

poor case!) Christians may truthfully say that it is God’s “ambition” to possess

the wholehearted love and loyalty of His children, but to imagine that He will

have no dealings with them until they are prepared to give Him perfect

devotion is just another manifestation of the ‘god of one hundred per cent.”

After all, who, apart from the very smug and complacent, would claim that they

were wholly “surrendered” or “converted” to love? And who would deny the

father’s interest in the prodigal son when his Spiritual Index was at a very low

figure indeed?


God is truly Perfection, but He is no Perfectionist, and one hundred per cent is

not God.

HEAVENLY BOSOM

The critics of the Christian religion have often contended that a religious faith

is a form of psychological “escapism.” A man, they say, finding the problems

and demands of adult life too much for him will attempt to return to the comfort

and dependence of childhood by picturing for himself a loving parent, whom

he calls God. It must be admitted that there is a good deal of ammunition

ready to hand for such an attack, and the first verse of a well-known and well-

loved hymn provides an obvious example—

Jesus, Lover of my soul,

Let me to Thy bosom fly,

While the nearer waters roll,

While the tempest still is high:

Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,

Till the storm of life be past;

Safe into the haven guide,

O receive my soul at last.

Here, if the words are taken at their face value, is sheer escapism, a

deliberate desire to be hidden safe away until the storm and stress of life is

over, and no explaining away by lovers of the hymn can alter its plain sense. It

can hardly be denied that if this is true Christianity, then the charge of

“escapism,” of emotional immaturity and childish regression, must be frankly

conceded. But although this “God of escape” is quite common the true

Christian course is set in a very different direction. No one would accuse its

Founder of immaturity in insight, thought, teaching, or conduct, and the history


of the Christian Church provides thousands of examples of timid half-

developed personalities who have not only found in their faith what the

psychologists call integration, but have coped with difficulties and dangers in a

way that makes any gibe of “escapism” plainly ridiculous.

Yet is there in Christianity a legitimate element of what the inimical might call

escapism?

The authentic Christian tradition, and particularly the biographies of those who

might be considered in the front rank of Christian “saints,” show that

throughout the ages heroic men and women have found in God their “refuge”

as well as their “strength.” It would be absurd to think that people of such

spiritual stature were all under the influence of a childish regression, and we

are forced to look farther for the explanation.

It has been well said by several modern psychologists that it is not the

outward storms and stresses of life that defeat and disrupt personality, but its

inner conflicts and miseries. If a man is happy and stable at heart, he can

normally cope, even with zest, with difficulties that lie outside his personality.

For example, a man who is happily married and can return daily to a happy

home is not likely to be defeated by outward trials and strains. But the same

man could quite easily go to pieces and find life altogether too much for him if

his marriage, for instance, were to collapse—if in fact the centre of his

operations were destroyed.

Now Christians maintain that it is precisely this secure centre which faith in

God provides. The genuine Christian can and does venture out into all kinds

of exacting and even perilous activities, but all the time he knows that he has

a completely stable and unchanging centre of operations to which he can

return for strength, refreshment, and recuperation. In that sense he does

“escape” to God, though he does not avoid the duties or burdens of life. His


very “escape” fits him for the day-to-day engagement with life’s strains and

difficulties.

But having said this—for it must be said—about the legitimate periodical

retirement of the Christian into conscious contact with his God, let us return to

the inadequate idea of God which is all too common with certain people—the

god in whose bosom we can hide “till the storm of life be past.” Those who are

actually, though unconsciously, looking for a father- or mother-substitute can,

by constant practice, readily imagine just such a convenient and comfortable

god. They may call him “Jesus” and even write nice little hymns about him, but

he is not the Jesus of the Gospels, who certainly would have discouraged any

sentimental flying to His bosom and often told men to go out and do most

difficult and arduous things. His understanding and sympathy were always at

the disposal of those who needed Him, yet the general impression of His

personality in the Gospels is of One who was leading men on to fuller

understanding and maturity. So far from encouraging them to escape life He

came to bring, in His own words, “life more abundant,” and in the end He left

His followers to carry out a task that might have daunted the stoutest heart.

Original Christianity had certainly no taint of escapism.

But those who try to maintain this particular inadequate god today by

perpetuating the comfortable protection of early childhood do, probably,

unknowingly, a good deal of harm. Here are examples.

1. They prevent themselves from growing up. So long as they imagine that

God is saying “Come unto Me” when He is really saying “Go out in My Name,”

they are preventing themselves from ever putting on spiritual muscle, or

developing the right sort of independence—quite apart from the fact that they

achieve very little for the cause to which they believe they are devoted.


2. By infecting others with the “to-Thy-bosom-fly” type of piety, they may easily

encourage those with a tendency that way to remain childish and evade

responsibility.

3. By providing the critics with living examples of “escapism” they are

responsible for a misrepresentation of the genuine Faith, which repels the

psychologically mature who, naturally enough, have no wish to embrace a

sentimental Jesus.

4. By “retiring hurt” instead of fighting on, they prevent the implications of the

Christian message from touching whole tracts of human life and activity which

badly need redeeming. The late Oswald Chambers once asserted that “the

Christian has no right to lurk in the bosom of Jesus because his thinking gives

him a headache”—which sums up this aspect of the matter very neatly.

A gibe that was levelled at the early Church was that Christians were nearly

all drawn from the criminal or debased slave classes. The answer to the

amount of truth contained in that thrust is that those who knew they were

sinners, and those who knew how hard life could be, were naturally more

likely to respond to a gospel offering a solution to the sinful and oppressed,

than those who thought they were “good” and were comfortably protected

against many of life’s cruelties. But the Christians did not remain criminals

after their conversion, and many of the spineless slaves became capable and

responsible servants.

Today the gibe is that the message of Christianity attracts only the

psychologically immature. Even if that charge were true, the answer to it

would be that those who know that they are at sixes and sevens with

themselves are more likely to respond to a gospel offering psychological

integration (among other things), than those who feel perfectly competent and

well adjusted. Nevertheless, the true Christian does not long REMAIN either

immature or in internal conflict. It is only if he becomes “fixed” with the


inadequate god of escape that he exhibits the pathetic figure of the habitual

bosom-flyer.

GOD-IN-A-BOX

The man who is outside all organized Christianity may have, and often does

have, a certain reverence for God, and a certain genuine respect for Jesus

Christ (though he has probably rarely considered Him and His claims with his

adult mind). But what sticks in his throat about the Christianity of the Churches

is not merely their differences in denomination, but the spirit of “churchiness”

which seems to pervade them all. They seem to him to have captured and

tamed and trained to their own liking Something that is really far too big ever

to be forced into little man-made boxes with neat labels upon them. He may

never think of putting it into words, but this is what he thinks and feels.

“If,” the Churches appear to be saying to him, “you will jump through our

particular hoop or sign on our particular dotted line, then we will introduce you

to God. But if not, then there’s no God for you.” This seems to him to be

nonsense, and nasty arrogant nonsense at that. “If there’s a God at all,” he

feels rather angrily, “then He’s here in the home and in the street, here in the

pub and in the workshop. And if it’s true that He’s interested in me and wants

me to love and serve Him, then He’s available for me and every other Tom,

Dick, or Harry, who wants Him, without any interference from the

professionals. If God is God, He’s BIG, and generous and magnificent, and I

can’t see that anybody can say they’ve made a ‘corner’ in God, or shut Him up

in their particular box.”

Of course, it is easy to leap to the defence of the Churches, and point out that

every cause must be organized if it is to be effective, that every society must

have its rules, that Christ Himself founded a Church, and so on. But if the

Churches give the outsider the impression that God works almost exclusively

through the machinery they have erected and, what is worse, damns all other


machinery which does not bear their label, then they cannot be surprised if he

finds their version of God cramped and inadequate and refuses to “join their

union.”

There are doubtless many reasons for the degeneration of Christianity into

churchiness, and the narrowing of the Gospel for all mankind into a set of

approved beliefs; but the chief cause must be the worship of an inadequate

god, a cramped and regulated god who is “a good churchman” according to

the formulas of the worshipper. For actual behaviour infallibly betrays the real

object of a man’s worship.

All Christians, whatever their Church, would of course instantly repudiate the

idea that their god was a super-example of their own denomination, and it is

not suggested that the worship is conscious. Nevertheless, beneath the

conscious critical level of the mind it is perfectly possible for the Anglo-

Catholic, for example, to conceive God as particularly pleased with Anglo-

Catholicism, doubtful about Evangelicalism, and frankly displeased by all

forms of Nonconformity. The Roman Catholic who asserts positively that

ordination in the Anglican Church is “invalid,” and that no “grace” is receivable

through the Anglican sacraments, is plainly worshipping a god who is a

Roman Catholic, and who operates reluctantly, if at all, through non-Roman

channels. The ultra-low Churchman on the other hand must admit, if he is

honest, that the god whom he worships disapproves most strongly of

vestments, incense, and candles on the altar. The tragedy of these examples,

which could be reproduced ad nauseam any day of the week, is not difference

of opinion, which will probably be with us till the Day of Judgment, but the

outrageous folly and damnable sin of trying to regard God as the Party Leader

of a particular point of view.

The thoughtful man outside the Churches is not offended so much by the

DIFFERENCES of denominations. To him, in his happy ignorance, these are

merely the normal psychological variations of human taste and temperament


being expressed in the religious sphere. What he cannot stomach is the

exclusive claim made by each to be the “right one.” His judgment is rightly

empirical—did not Christ say, “By their fruits ye shall know them”? If he were

to observe that the Church which makes the boldest and most exclusive claim

to be constituted and maintained according to Almighty God’s own ideas was

obviously producing the finest Christian character, obviously wielding the

highest Christian influence, and obviously most filled by the living Spirit of

God—he could perhaps forgive the exclusive claim. BUT HE FINDS

NOTHING OF THE KIND. No denomination has a monopoly of God’s grace,

and note has an exclusive recipe for producing Christian character. It is quite

plain to be the disinterested observer that the real God takes no notice

whatever of the boxes; “the Spirit bloweth where it listeth” and is subject to no

regulation of man.

Moreover, our thoughtful observer who is outside the Churches has done a

good deal of thinking on his own. The discoveries of modern physical and

biological science, of astronomy, and of psychology, have profoundly

influenced his conception of the “size” of God. If there be a Mind behind the

immense complexities of the phenomena that man can observe, then it is that

of a Being tremendous in His power and wisdom: it is emphatically not that of

a little god. It is perfectly conceivable that such a Being has a moral purpose

which is being worked out on the stage of this small planet. It is even possible

to believe that such a God deliberately reduced Himself to the stature of

humanity in order to visit the earth in Person, as all Christians affirm. But the

sort of thing which outrages reason and sets sanity rocking on her seat is to

be told that such a God can only operate where there is an unbroken

succession of bishops!

The “outsider” who knows nothing of the mixture of tradition, conviction,

honest difference, and hidden resentment, that lies behind the divisions of the

Christian Churches sees clearly the advantage of a united Christian front and

cannot see why the Churches cannot “get together.” The problem is doubtless


complicated, for there are many honest differences held with equal sincerity,

but it is only made INSOLUBLE because the different denominations are

(possibly unconsciously) imagining God to be Roman or Anglican or Baptist or

Methodist or Presbyterian or what have you. If they could see beyond their

little inadequate god, and glimpse the reality of God, they might even laugh a

little and perhaps weep a little. The result would be a unity that actually does

transcend differences, instead of ignoring them with public politeness and

private contempt.

MANAGING DIRECTOR

There is a conception of God which seems at first sight to be very lofty and

splendid, but which proves paradoxically enough on examination to be yet

another of the “too small” ideas. It is to think that the God who is responsible

for the terrifying vastnesses of the Universe cannot possibly be interested in

the lives of the minute specks of consciousness which exist on this

insignificant planet. To have even the beginnings of an appreciation of the

greatness of the Power controlling the incredible System that science is

beginning to reveal to us is a staggering but salutary experience. We may

feel, since God is so huge and our whole sphere of life (let alone an individual

man) is so minute by comparison, that we cannot conceive His taking the

detailed interest in a single human life that the protagonists of the Christian

religion affirm. To those, and they are not a few, who are secretly wishing for

release from moral responsibility (and whose every argument about religion is

coloured by the desire), this may be a great relief—the sort of relief that a

schoolboy might find in realizing that in a school of a thousand boys his

peccadilloes are very unlikely to be noticed by the Headmaster. To others the

thought of their insignificance may be desolating—they feel not so much set

free as cast adrift.

But whatever a man’s reaction may be to the idea of the terrific “size” of God,

the point to note is that his comment is this: “I CANNOT IMAGINE such a


tremendous God being interested in me,” and so on. He “cannot imagine”:

which means simply that his mind is incapable of retaining the ideas of

terrifying vastness and of minute attention to microscopic detail at the same

time. But it in no way proves that God is incapable of fulfilling both ideas (and

a great many more). Behind this inability to conceive such a God there

probably lies the old unconscious, but very common, cause of “inadequate

gods”—the tendency to build up a mental picture of God from our knowledge

and experience of man. We know, for instance, that if a man is in charge of

fifty other men he can fairly easily make himself familiar with the history,

character, abilities, and peculiarities, of each man. If he is in change of five

hundred he may still take a personal interest in each one; but it is almost

impossible for him to know and retain in his memory personal details of the

individual. If he is in charge of five thousand men he may in general be wise

and benevolent; but he cannot, indeed he does not attempt to, know his men

as individuals. The higher he is, the fewer his individual contacts. Because in

our modern world we are tending more and more to see men amassed in

large numbers, for various purposes, we are forced to realize that the

individual care of the “one in charge” must grow less and less. This realization

has permeated our unconscious minds, and we find it almost inevitably

suggested to us that the Highest of All must have the fewest contacts with the

individual. Indeed if He is Infinitely High the idea of contact with an

infinitesimal individual becomes laughable. BUT ONLY IF WE ARE

MODELLING GOD UPON WHAT WE KNOW OF MAN.

That is why it is contended here that what at first sight appears to be almost a

super-adequate idea of God is, in reality, inadequate—it is based on too tiny a

foundation. Man may be made in the image of God; but it is not sufficient to

conceive God as nothing more than an infinitely magnified man. There are, for

example, those who are considerably worried by the thought of God

simultaneously hearing and answering the prayers and aspirations of people

all over the world. That may be because their mental picture is of a harassed

telephone operator answering callers at a switchboard of superhuman size. It


is really better to say frankly, “I can’t imagine how it can be done” (which is the

literal truth), than to confuse the mind with the picture of an enlarged man

performing the impossible.

All the “lofty” concepts of the greatness of God need to be carefully watched

lest they turn out to be mere magnifications of certain human characteristics.

We may, for instance, admire the ascetic ultra-spiritual type which appears to

have “a mind above” food, sexual attraction, and material comfort, for

example. But if in forming a picture of the Holiness of God we are simply

enlarging this spirituality and asceticism to the “Nth” degree, we are forced to

some peculiar conclusions. Thus we may find ourselves readily able to

imagine God’s interest in babies (for are they not “little bits of Heaven”?), yet

unable to imagine His approval, let alone design, of the acts which led to their

conception!

Similarly it is natural and right, of course, that the worship we offer to God in

public should be of the highest possible quality. But that must not lead us to

conceive a musically “Third- Programme” god who prefers the exquisite

rendering of a cynical professional choir to the ragged bawling of sincere but

untutored hearts. To hold a conception of God as a mere magnified human

being is to run the risk of thinking of Him as simply the Commander-in-Chief

who cannot possibly spare the time to attend to the details of His

subordinates’ lives. Yet to have a god who is so far beyond personality and so

far removed from the human context in which we alone can appreciate

“values,” is to have a god who is a mere bunch of perfect qualities—which

means an Idea and nothing more. We need a God with the capacity to hold,

so to speak, both Big and Small in His Mind at the same time. This, the

Christian religion holds, is the true and satisfying conception of God revealed

by Jesus Christ, and we will study it further in a later chapter.

SECOND-HAND GOD


Most people, naturally, have a somewhat restricted view of life, and they rely

to a far larger extent than they realize on the vicarious experience of life to be

found in books, films, and plays. Few of us, for example, have known at all

intimately a detective, a dress-designer, a circus-proprietor, a pugilist, or a

Harley Street specialist. Yet a skilful writer can make us feel that we have

entered the very hearts and lives of these, and many other, people. Almost

without question we add what we have read or seen to the sum total of what

we call our “experience.” The process is almost entirely automatic, and

probably most of us would be greatly shocked if it could suddenly be revealed

to us how small a proportion of our accumulated “knowledge of the world” is

due to first-hand observation and experience.

The significance of this second hand knowledge of life to the subject we are

considering is this: the conception of the Character of God which slowly forms

in our minds is largely made be the conclusions we draw from the

“providences” and “judgments” of life. We envisage “God” very largely from

the way in which He appears to deal with (or not to deal with) His creatures. If,

therefore, our knowledge of life is (unknown to us in all probability) faulty or

biased or sentimental, we are quite likely to find ourselves with a second-hand

god who is quite different from the real one.

There are three main ways in which fiction (in which term we include books,

films, and plays) can mislead us, and in consequence profoundly affect the

idea we unconsciously hold of God and His operation in human life.

1. The tacit ignoring of God and all “Religious” issues.

A vast amount of fiction presents life as though there were no God at all, and

men and women had no religious side to their personalities whatever. We may

for instance meet, in fiction, charming people who exhibit the most delightful

qualities, surmount incredible difficulties with heart-stirring courage, make the

most noble sacrifices and achieve the utmost happiness and serenity—all


without the slightest reference to God. The reader is almost bound to reflect

that all the fuss Christianity makes about “seeking God’s strength” and so on

is much ado about nothing.

Conversely, we not infrequently read of evil characters who, for all their lust,

cruelty, meanness, or pride, never seem to suffer the faintest twinge of

conscience. There appears to be no spiritual force at work pointing out to

them, at vulnerable moments, a better way of living; and repentance is

unthinkable. The reader is again, unconsciously, likely to conclude that God

does nothing to influence “bad” characters.

This by-pass which neatly avoids God and the religious side of life is not

characteristic perhaps of the very best fiction, but it is extremely common. In

films in particular, with a few notable exceptions, “providence” is subject to

almost cast-iron conventions. These include the socially desirable “crime-

does-not-pay” ethic, and the inevitable happy ending. But any resemblance

between the celluloid providence and the real actions of God in human affairs

is purely coincidental. In actual life, as any parson worth his salt well knows,

ordinary people do at times consider God and spiritual issues. The evil, and

even the careless, are occasionally touched by their consciences. Moreover,

the tensions and crises which are the breath of life to the fiction-writer are the

very things which frequently stimulate the latent spiritual or religious sense. It

is an extraordinary phenomenon that the modern writer who has, Heaven

knows, few reticences and who is sometimes almost morbidly analytical of his

characters’ actions, should so frequently use the by-pass road round the

whole sphere of a man’s relations with his God.

2. The Wilful Misrepresentation of Religion.

It can of course be argued that it is no part of the duty of a writer of fiction to

provide Christian propaganda—and that is perfectly true. But it is equally no

part of his work, which is “to hold up a mirror to life,” to give the impression


that Christianity and the Church are no more than a subject for ridicule. It may

of course be great fun for him—he may be working off a childhood grudge

against an Evangelical aunt—to represent clergymen as comic, bigoted, or

childishly ignorant of life, and Christians as smug hypocrites. He may even

feel that there is more dramatic value in the rector who is a domestic tyrant or

the nonconformist deacon who is a secret sadist than in the genuine articles.

But he is not, in so doing, being fair to the actual facts of life, even though his

writing may prove highly gratifying to the reader who is only too ready to

welcome this endorsement of his own feeling that “religion is all rot anyway.”

Again, this criticism cannot fairly be levelled at the best fiction, but it is

extremely common in the popular type, and slowly but surely affects the

conception of religion and of God in the minds of many readers.

3. The Manipulation of Providence

The author of fiction (and this is not the least of the attractions of authorship)

is in the position of a god to his own creatures. He can move in a mysterious

way, or an outrageous way, or an unjust way, his wonders to perform; and no

one can say him nay. If he works skilfully (as, for instance, did Thomas Hardy)

he may strongly infect his reader with, for example, the sense of a bitterly

jesting Fate in place of God. He can communicate heartbreak by the simplest

of manipulations, because he is himself providence, BUT HE IS NOT

THEREBY PROVIDING ANY EVIDENCE OF THE WORKINGS OF REAL

LIFE.

The whole tragedy of King Lear might be said to depend on Shakespeare’s

manipulation of the character of Cordelia. Because she is unable to see

(though every schoolgirl in the pit can see) the probably consequence of her

blunt “Nothing”, the tragedy is launched. But it would be a profound mistake to

confuse the organized disasters of even the greatest writer of tragedy with the

complex circumstances and factors which attend the sufferings of real life.


Conclusions as to the nature of Life and God can only in very rare instances

be inferred from the artificial evidence of fiction. We need therefore to be

constantly on our guard against the “Second-hand god”—the kind of god

which the continual absorption of fictional ideas nourishes at the back of our

minds. One tiny slice of real life, observed at first hand, provides better

grounds for our conclusions than the whole fairy world of fiction.

PERENNIAL GRIEVANCE

To some people the mental image of God is a kind of blur of disappointment.

“Here,” they say resentfully and usually with more than a trace of self-pity, “is

One whom I trusted, but He SET ME DOWN.” The rest of their lives is

consequently shadowed by this letdown. Thenceforth there can be no mention

of God, Church, religion, or even parson, without starting the whole process of

association with its melancholy conclusion: God is a Disappointment.

Some, of course, rather enjoy this never-failing well of grievance. The years

by no means dim the tragic details of the Prayer that was Unanswered or the

Disaster that was Undeserved. To recall God’s unfaithfulness appears to give

them the same ghoulish pleasure that others find in recounting the grisly

details of their “operation.” Others find, of course, that a God who has Himself

failed is the best possible excuse for those who do not wish to be involved in

any moral effort or moral responsibility. Any suggestion of obeying or following

God can be more than countered by another glance at the perennial

Grievance.

Such a god is, of course, in the highest degree inadequate. It is impossible for

people who have persuaded themselves that God has failed, to worship or

serve Him in any but a grudging and perfunctory spirit. What has usually

happened to such people is that they have set up in their minds what they

think God ought or ought not to do, and when He apparently fails to toe their

particular line they feel a sense of grievance. Yet it is surely more sensible, as


well as more fitting, for us human beings to find out, as far as we can, the

ways in which God works. We have to discover as far as we can the limits He

has set Himself for the purposes of this Great Experiment that we call Life—

and then do our best to align ourselves with the principles and co-operate with

the purposes that we have certainly had no say in deciding, but which

nevertheless in our highest moments we know are good. God will inevitably

appear to disappoint the man who is attempting to use Him as a convenience,

a prop, or a comfort, for his own plans. God has never been known to

disappoint the man who is sincerely wanting to co-operate with His own

purposes.

It must be freely admitted that, in this experimental world, to which God has

given the risky privilege of free will, there are inevitably “ills and accidents.”

Moreover, the cumulative effect over the centuries of millions of individuals’

choosing to please themselves rather than the Designer of “the whole show”

has infected the whole planet. That is what the theologians mean when they

call this a “sinful” world. This naturally means that, so far as this world is

concerned, the tough, insensitive, and selfish, will frequently appear to get

away with it, while the weak and sensitive will often suffer. Once we admit the

possibilities of free-will we can see that injustices and grievances are

inevitable. (As Christ once said: “It must needs be that offences come.”) We

may not agree with the risk that God took in giving Man the power to choose—

we might even have preferred God to make a race of robots who were

unfailingly good and cheerful and kind. But it is not in the least a question of

what God COULD HAVE DONE, but a question of what HE HAS DONE. We

have to accept the Scheme of Things as it is, and if we must blame someone,

it is surely fairer to blame Man who has chosen wrongly and produced a world

awry.

The people who feel that God is a Disappointment have not understood the

terms on which we inhabit this planet. They are wanting a world in which good

is rewarded and evil is punished—as in a well-run kindergarten. They want to


see the good man prosper invariably, and the evil man suffer invariably, here

and now. There is, of course, nothing wrong with their sense of justice. But

they misunderstand the conditions of this present temporary life in which God

withholds His Hand, in order, so to speak, to allow room for His plan of free

will to work itself out. Justice will be fully vindicated when the curtain falls on

the present stage, the house lights go on, and we go out into the Real World.

There will always be times when from our present limited point of view we

cannot see the wood for the trees. Glaring injustice and pointless tragedy will

sometimes be quite beyond our control and our understanding. We can, of

course, postulate an imaginary God with less good sense, love and justice

than we have ourselves, and we may find a perverse pleasure in blaming Him.

But that road leads nowhere. You cannot worship a Disappointment.

PALE GALILEAN

If they were completely honest, many people would have to admit that God is

to them an almost entirely negative force in their lives. It is not merely that He

provides that “gentle voice we hear ... which checks each fault,” but that His

whole Nature seems to deny, to cramp, and inhibit their own. Though such

people would never admit it, they are living endorsements of Swinburne’s

bitter lines: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, The world has grown grey

from Thy breath.

Compared with their non-Christian contemporaries, their lives seem to have

less life and colour, less spontaneity and less confidence. Their god surrounds

them with prohibitions but he does not supply them with vitality and courage.

They may live under the shadow of his hand but it makes them stunted, pale

and weak. Although the thought would appear blasphemous to his devotees,

such a god is quite literally a blight upon human life, and no one can be

surprised that he fails to attract the loyalty of those with spirit, independence,

and a keen enjoyment of the colour and richness of life.


The words written above are a plain exposure of a false god, but of course the

unhappy worshippers never see their bondage as clearly as that or they would

break away. They are bound to their negative god by upbringing, by the

traditions of a Church or party, by the manipulation of isolated texts of

Scripture or by a morbid conscience. At last they actually feel that it is wrong

to be themselves, wrong to be free, wrong to enjoy beauty, wrong to expand

and develop. Unless they have their god’s permission they can do nothing.

Disaster will infallibly bring them to heel, sooner or later, should they venture

beyond the confines of “his plan for them.”

Such people, naturally enough, can only by strenuous efforts maintain their

narrow loyalty. They do not get the chance to admire and love and worship in

wordless longing One who is overwhelmingly splendid and beautiful and

lovable. At best they can only love and worship because their god is a jealous

god, and it is his will and commandment that they should. Their lives are

cramped and narrow and joyless, because their god is the same. There must

be compensations in the worship of such a god, and they are usually these.

1. The belief that the joy and freedom of those who do NOT subscribe to the

worship of the negative god is just an illusion. Negative god worshippers often

sustain themselves by imagining and elaborating upon the inner strains and

conflicts of those who do not know their god. In fact, the strains and conflicts

of ordinary life are quite rightly felt by sensible people to be preferable to the

intolerable and never ending strain of worshipping a god who drains life of all

its vitality and colour.

2. There is a certain spiritually masochistic joy in being crushed by the

juggernaut of a negative god. This is perfectly brought out in a hymn which is

still sung in certain circles: Oh to be nothing, nothing, Only to lie at His feet, A

broken and emptied vessel For the Master’s use made meet. The sense of

humour is, of course, suspended by the negative god, or his devotees would


be bound to see the absurdity of anyone’s ambition being to be “nothing,” a

“broken” and, not unnaturally, “emptied” vessel lying at God’s feet! Better still,

the New Testament (a book full of freedom and joy, courage and vitality) might

be searched in vain to supply any endorsement whatsoever of the above truly

dreadful verse and the conception of God it typifies. If ever a book taught men

to be “something, something,” to stand and do battle, to be far more full of joy

and daring and life than they ever were without god—that book is the New

Testament!

3. The comforting idea of being “something special.” Worshippers of the

negative god often comfort themselves by feeling that what is good enough for

“the world” is not good enough for them: the chosen, the unique. Even though

this means a life denuded of the beauties of art, of normal pleasures and

recreation, a life cramped in all normal means of expression—that is a small

price to pay for being the separate, the unique.

This pathetic idea of being “something special” is clung to with desperation, so

that we find worshippers of the negative god who know in their secret hearts

that their lives cannot really exhibit any superior qualities to those of their

“worldly” or “worldly Christian” friends, clinging tightly to their rules of

“separateness”—so that they may at least feel that they are marked out as the

especial favourites of their god!

All this is very unattractive and unpleasant, but it is quite common among

religious people. The question for them is: dare they defy and break away

from this imaginary god with the perpetual frown and find the One who is the

great Positive, who gives life, courage and joy, and wants His sons and

daughters to stand on their own feet?

PROJECTED IMAGE


Just as the cinema apparatus projects onto the screen a large image from a

picture about the size of a postage stamp, so the human mind has a tendency

to “project” on to other people ideas and emotions that really exist in itself.

The guilty man, for example, will project on to other people suspicion and

disapproval, even though they are completely ignorant of his guilt. This, of

course, is an everyday psychological phenomenon.

We tend to do the same thing in our mental conception of God. (As has

already been pointed out there are some who would go so far as to say the

whole idea of God is simply a “projection” in adult life of the childish desire for

a Father’s protection; but this we cannot accept for the reasons given above.)

A harsh and puritanical society will project its dominant qualities and probably

postulate a hard and puritanical god. A lax and easy-going society will

probably produce a god with about as much moral authority as Father

Christmas.

The same tendency is observable in individual cases. We have already noted

in “God-in-a-box” how a certain type of keen Churchman, for example, tends

to produce a god of Impeccable Churchmanship. But, of course, the inclination

goes farther than this, and there is always a danger of imagining a God with

moral qualities like our own, vastly magnified and purified of course, and

WITH THE SAME BLIND SPOTS. Thus the god whom we imagine may have

his face set against drunkenness (an evil which, though it does not tempt us,

fills us with horror and indignation), may turn a blind eye to our business

methods because he feels, as we do, that “business is business”!

Obviously, unless the conception of God is something higher than a

Magnification of our own Good Qualities, our service and worship will be no

more and no less than the service and worship of ourselves. Such a god may

be a prop to our self-esteem but is, naturally, incapable of assisting us to win

a moral victory and will be found in time of serious need to fade

disconcertingly away.


Moreover, we are so made that we cannot really be satisfied with a mere

projection. Even Narcissus must at times have grown tired of admiring his own

reflection! The very fact that in choosing a friend or a life-partner men

frequently choose someone very different from themselves is enough to show

that they are not only and forever seeking an echo of their own personalities.

If we are to be moved to real worship and stirred to give ourselves, it must be

by Something not merely infinitely higher but Something “other” than

ourselves.

The Christian answer to this need we shall consider later on, and we will do

no more than point out here that the god who is wholly, or even partially, a

mere projection of ourselves is quite inadequate for life’s demands and can

never arouse in us true worship or service. Indeed he is as real a danger as

the pool became at last to Narcissus.

ASSORTED:

The foregoing round dozen do not by any means exhaust the little gods which

infest human minds. Too much space would be occupied by fully describing

them all, but a brief description of a few more may suffice to expose their

falsity.

GOD IN A HURRY

If there is one thing which should be quite plain to those who accept the

revelation of God in Nature and the Bible, it is that He is never in a hurry. Long

preparation, careful planning, and slow growth, would seem to be leading

characteristics of spiritual life. Yet there are many people whose religious

tempo is feverish. With a fine disregard for its context they flourish like a

banner the text, “The King’s business requireth haste,” and proceed to drive

themselves and their followers nearly mad with tension and anxiety!


“Consider,” cries the passionate advocate of foreign missions, “that every

second, thousands of pagan souls pass into a Christless eternity.” “Evangelize

to a finish in this generation!” cries the enthusiastic young convert at his

missionary meeting. It is refreshing, and salutary, to study the poise and

quietness of Christ. His task and responsibility might well have driven a man

out of his mind. But He was never in a hurry, never impressed by numbers,

never a slave of the clock. He was acting, He said, as He observed God to

act—never in a hurry.

GOD FOR THE ELITE

It is characteristic of human beings to create and revere a “privileged class,”

and some modern Christians regard the mystic as being somehow spiritually a

cut above his fellows. Ordinary forms of worship and prayer may suffice for

the ordinary man, but for the one who has direct apprehension of God—he is

literally in a class by himself. You cannot expect a man to attend Evensong in

his parish church when there are visions waiting for him in his study!

The New Testament does not subscribe to this flattering view of those with a

gift for mystic vision. It is always downright and practical. It is by their fruits

that men shall be known: God is no respecter of persons: true religion is

expressed by such humdrum things as visiting those in trouble and steadfastly

maintaining faith despite exterior circumstances. It is not, of course, that the

New Testament considers it a bad thing for a man to have a vision of God, but

there is a wholesome insistence on such a vision being worked out in love and

service.

It should be noted, at least by those who accept Christ’s claim to be God, that

He by no means fits into the picture of the “mystic saint.” Those who are

fascinated by the supposed superiority of the mystic soul might profitably

compile a list of its characteristics and place them side by side with those of

Christ. The result would probably expose a surprising conclusion.


There is, in fact, no provision for a “privileged class” in genuine Christianity. “It

shall not be so among you,” said Christ to His early followers, “all ye are

brethren.”

GOD OF BETHEL

There are quiet a number of religious people who might fairly be said, if the

truth were told, to be more at home with Jehovah than with Jesus Christ. The

Old Testament, again if the truth were told, means more to them than the

New.

These are the people who see religion as a contract: they obey certain rules

and God will faithfully look after them and their interests. These are people

who write to the papers and say “if only” the nation would obey the Ten

Commandments then God would grant victory, or rain, or fine weather, or

whatever the need of the moment may be. They like everything cut-and-dried

and even the Gospel is reduced to a formula; so that if you sign on the dotted

line, so to speak, you are all right for Heaven! They prefer the letter to the

spirit and definite commandments to vague principles. They more usually refer

to “the Lord” than to “God.” Such people have not appreciated the

revolutionary character of God’s invasion of the world in Christ, though they

would be horrified if it were suggested that they have not yet accepted the

import of His pronouncement: “It hath been said of old time ... BUT I SAY

UNTO YOU.”

But their Old Testament God will not suffice for the hunger of modern man,

however they may wring their hands at the “unbelief” of today. God is not a

God of the dead, but of the living.

GOD WITHOUT GODHEAD


This conception is one of the most “enlightened” and “modern.” God is

completely de-personalized and becomes the Ultimate Bundle of Highest

Values. Such an idea is usually held by those who lead sheltered lives and

who have little experience of the crude stuff of ordinary human life. It is

manifestly impossible for any except the most intellectual to hold in his mind

(let alone worship and serve) a God who is no more than what we think to be

the highest values raised to the Nth degree.

GODS BY ANY OTHER NAME

Man has rightly been defined as a “worshipping animal.” If for some reason he

has no God he will unquestionably worship SOMETHING. Common modern

substitutes are the following: the State, success, efficiency, money, “glamour,”

power, even security. Nobody, of course, calls them “God”; but they have the

influence and command the devotion which should belong to the real God. It is

only when a man finds God that he is able to see how his worshipping instinct

has been distorted and misdirected.

TRANSITIONAL NOTE

Before proceeding to the second part of this work, the author feels that a short

word of explanation is due.

It is not our intention to build up merely a bigger and better god, who may be

just as much an artificiality as any of the unattractive galaxy we have

discarded. What we are going to try to do is to open the windows of the mind

and spirit—to put it crudely, to enlarge the aperture through which the light of

the true God may shine. If a man lives in a lightproof room, the sun may shine

in dazzling splendour and the man himself will know nothing of it. He may light

himself a candle or he may bore a hole in his prison. In the first case, he can

never have more than an artificial glimmer, and in the second he will get only

a tiny glimpse of real daylight. Some of the gods we have considered are


nothing more than artificial; some of them are inadequate pinhole glimpses of

the true Light. What we are going to try to do, then, is not to light fresh

candles, but to take down the shutters. There is no reason why we should be

content with the candle or the pinhole if a little determined thinking and a little

sincere action will remove the shutters.

An Adequate God

GOD UNFOCUSED

It may seem to some that a great deal of time has been spent in “clearing the

ground”; but it is absolutely necessary. We shall never want to serve God in

our real and secret hearts if He looms in our subconscious mind as an

arbitrary Dictator or a Spoil-sport, or as one who takes advantage of His

position to make us poor mortals feel guilty and afraid. We have not only to be

impressed by the “size” and unlimited power of God, we have to be moved to

genuine admiration, respect, and affection, if we are ever to worship Him.

First, however, let us fling wide the doors and windows of our minds and make

some attempt to appreciate the “size” of God. He must not be limited to

religious matters or even to the “religious” interpretation of life. He must not be

confined to one particular section of time nor must we imagine Him as the

local god of this planet or even only of the Universe that astronomical survey

has so far discovered. It is not, of course, physical size that we are trying to

establish in our minds. (Physical size is not important. By any reasonable

scheme of values a human being is of vastly greater worth than a mountain

ten million times his physical size.) It is rather to see the immensely broad

sweep of the Creator’s activity, the astonishing complexity of His mental

processes which science laboriously uncovers, the vast sea of what we can

only call “God” in a small corner of which man lives and moves and has his

being.


To meditate on this broadness and vastness will do much to expose the

inadequate little gods, but if we stop there we may get no farther than sensing

a vague “unfocused” God, a de-personalized “Something” which is after a

while peculiarly unsatisfying. There are those who would make this

“Something” the God of the future. Building up a mental concept from known

values like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, they would have us hold in our

minds and worship in our hearts the Source of Supreme Values. Such a God

is not a Person in any sense, and though such an idea seems to satisfy some

of the most intellectual of our time, it does not, and probably will never, satisfy

the ordinary man. It certainly does not appear to supply a Gospel to redeem

the despairs and futilities of life, nor does it in practice appear to provide a

spearhead against old-established evils. To worship, to love, and to serve,

implies for most of us a Person with whom we can establish some personal

relationship, although one cannot help pointing out that one great attraction of

a non-personal God is that no claim can be made upon us! He (or It) may be

used as much or as little as we like!

Thus we can see the dilemma, though often unconscious, of many modern

people outside organized religion. If they use their minds and imaginations,

they cannot help seeing that if there is a Supreme Being, He must be infinitely

vaster than our forefathers’ conceptions. The more they know, the more

science reveals to them, the wider grow the mental horizons and the more

inadequate grow the old little gods. And yet this vastness seems to de-

personalize God more and more, until he becomes a vague unfocused

Abstraction.

In the face of this dilemma, many abandon the idea of knowing God, and pin

their hopes and apply their energies to the “progress” of the human race. In

despair at ever coming to terms with “eternal” values, they get a certain

amount of satisfaction in improving the “here and now,” concerning

themselves with present values of which they are reasonably sure.


Yet, in fact, unless we can relate this activity to God, i.e., to Something

beyond time and space, it is a singularly fatuous thing to do, and we only need

a few logical steps to appreciate it. Let us admit for the moment that we ARE

making progress, that the human race for all its devastating wars is becoming

slowly and surely more and more healthy, wealthy and wise.

Suppose that this process, notwithstanding set-backs, continues for

thousands, even millions of years. Presumably, then, at some time in the very

remote future the human beings then living on this planet will have conquered

Nature by scientific knowledge, will have resolved all tensions and

maladjustments of personal relationships by vastly improved psychological

methods, and will be living lives of almost unbelievable health and happiness

and satisfaction. That, we may fairly say, is the aim of those who freely give

their energies to the progress of the human race, and who exhort us to “live

for posterity.” But what then? This planet eventually, as far as our knowledge

goes, either will become to cold to support life (even by artificial means), or

will be destroyed by collision with some other heavenly body. That means that

the total result of human progress, of every effort and aspiration and ideal will

be annihilation in the deathly cold of inter-stellar space. And there is nothing

more to come.

Yet this—human progress—is to many the greatest value for which to live. Of

course if they stop short of the final scene, they may persuade themselves

that the eventual happiness of our descendants a million years hence is a

worthy ideal for which to live and die. But if the end is NOTHING, SHEER

NON-EXISTENCE, surely no reasonable person can regard it as an ideal to

command the whole loyalty of an adult mind and heart.

A CLUE TO REALITY

The discovery of the enormous energy released by nuclear fission and the

unforgettable demonstrations of the destructive power of the “atom bomb”


have done us a service in our quest for Reality that perhaps we hardly realize.

They have demonstrated before the whole world that what we call “matter” is

in fact destructible. Those things that we formerly regarded as almost

imperishable, such as armour plate and concrete, could, under certain

conditions, be dissipated into vapour less substantial than the smoke from a

cigarette. Indeed, since the whole stuff of our planet, animate and inanimate,

is composed of variously arranged atoms, it is by no means unthinkable that

some experiment or deliberate act might result in a chain-reaction, exploding,

so to speak, every atom of which this world is composed. Whether we like it or

not, we live now under the shadow of such universal disintegration. This can

hardly do other than set our minds to value far more highly than ever before

the “spiritual” values. By these we mean the qualities of spirit, of personality,

which are recognizable and assessable, but are incapable either of scientific

weighing and measuring—and incapable of physical destruction. In the light of

the probably ultimate fate of the planet and of the present (far more

impressive) threat to human life, we are driven to reconsider whether after all

there is reality beyond the physical, measurable reality. We begin to wonder

whether the whole position is not now the reverse of what men once thought.

They used to talk of the “spiritual” values as shadowy and unsubstantial, and

the physical as solid and “real” and reliable. They are beginning to see that

the opposite may well be true. We can certainly see evidence of the universal

destructibility of matter: perhaps it is after all true that “reality” lies in another

realm altogether, and that its values are not unsubstantial after all.

This, of course, is far more readily believed by some temperaments than by

others. The poets, artists, and philosophers, as well as a great many other

undistinguished people, of many ages, have probably been more or less

acutely conscious that the “spiritual” is of vastly greater importance than the

material. To all of them, speaking broadly, this present physical life is the

visible and tangible stage or battlefield of spiritual forces. Universal values,

such as truth, goodness, and beauty, were often considered to exist apart

from, as well as being exhibited in, the life of this world. To some of them this


present life is merely the prelude, lived under difficulty and handicap, to a free

unfettered life of the spirit. The latter is reality—the former is an important but

transitory incident.

This age-long intuition is now being forced upon humanity as a strong and

workable hypothesis by the threatened disintegration of the merely physical.

And there is enough inward assent to it in the hearts of most men to give them

at any rate one powerful clue to reality. It makes the idea of God far more

sensible and far more desirable.

After all, if it should be true that the nature of reality is spiritual and it is only

quite temporarily and incidentally involved in matter, it is not unreasonable to

want to know something of the Spiritual Being behind the Scheme of Things.

And on those unimaginative people to whom the spiritual has always sounded

fanciful and unreal, it is slowly dawning that the physical world which is so real

and tangible to them is most uncomfortably unreliable. A man used to be able

to reckon on a good number of years of active material life, which were a most

efficient buffer between him and the naked spiritual realities which in his more

vulnerable moments he suspected might be true. Now his buffer of material

things has been shown to be far from dependable. At any moment he might be

pitchforked into the world of the spirit. His anchors are slipping, and if he feels

the need of anchorage (and who, at heart, does not?) he must find it in the

world of the spirit—he must find God.

NOTE.

It must not be supposed that what we call spiritual (and which is at present

invisible) is less “solid” than matter. It may well prove, since it is indestructible,

to be in a sense, MORE solid. It is only our peculiar way of looking at things

which makes a man’s muscles, for example, appear more solid than his

“spiritual” assets of personality. This idea of the real world being more “solid”


is most ably and ingeniously worked out by Dr. C. S. Lewis in his fantasy of

Heaven and Hell: The Great Divorce.

FURTHER CLUES TO REALITY

In all probability everyone is sensitive to beauty, although obviously some are

far more so than others. Yet experience shows that even those who are

apparently most prosaic are touched, even to their own surprise, by certain

forms of beauty. The line along which this half-melancholy, half-magic touch

may come varies enormously with different people. For some it is the

appealing grace of childhood, for some the surge and thunder of the sea, for

some the dazzling splendour of mountain peak, for some the song of birds in

spring, for some the smell of wood-smoke or of frosty autumn evenings, for

some—but the list is endless. All poetry and music, and art of every true sort,

bears witness to man’s continual falling in love with beauty, and his desperate

attempt to induce beauty to live with him and enrich his common life.

True beauty always seems to bear with it a note of gentle sadness, sometimes

very poignant; and it may well puzzle us why this should be so. If the beautiful

is so desirable and so welcome it should surely bring unqualified joy. There is

rarely accompanying sadness in other earthly joys. In the enjoyment of a

hearty meal, in the successful solving of a difficult problem, or in the fulfilment

of creative activity, there is joy, but no melancholy. It is possible that beauty is

a hint of the real and true and permanent, so that we feel without conscious

process of thought: “This is what life should be, or what it IS in reality.” And

therefore to compare THAT with our ordinary everyday experience with all its

imperfection and ugliness gives rise to the poignant pain? Or is it, as some

hold, fancifully perhaps, a kind of nostalgia—what Wordsworth would call an

“intimation of immortality.” Is it the eternal spirit in a man remembering here in

his house of clay the shining joys of his real Home?


No one, of course, can say. But the appeal of beauty which is universal,

however distorted or debased it may have become, cannot be lightly

dismissed. It is a pointer to something, and it certainly points to something

beyond the present limitations of time and space. We can at any rate say that

beauty arouses a hunger and a longing which is never satisfied (and some

would say never can be satisfied) in this world. The second clue to the nature

of reality is what we can only call by the slightly forbidding title of “goodness.”

Disabusing our minds of self-conscious righteousness, goody-goodyness and

mere absence of evil, there is something unavoidably attractive about the

good. However far from the ideal our own practice may be, we have an

automatic respect for such things as honesty, sincerity, faithfulness,

incorruptibility, kindness, justice, and respect for other people. Indeed, we

hardly saw the significance of our acknowledgement of the worth of these

things until they were directly challenged by the late Nazi regime. Even now a

great many people have hardly grasped the significance of the fact that we, in

common with millions of others, denounced the treachery, brutality, lies, and

cynical denial of traditional moral values, as “evil things.” Unless our feeling

for goodness is a clue to ultimate Reality the most we can do is to say that we

personally dislike the characteristics of the Nazi philosophy. Unless there is

some moral standard to which we are (unconsciously) referring the question, it

can be no more than mere difference of opinion. The Nazi had a perfect right

to say that he disliked our moral values, and who is to say whether he or we

were in the right? To reply that methods of treachery, brutality, and

inhumanity, offend the universal conscience of mankind is to establish more

firmly the point we are trying to make. WHY is there this almost universal

moral sense? Why do we consider that “good” is a better thing than “evil”?

Surely this recognition of good, so deeply rooted and so universal, is another

far from negligible pointer to Reality. Both beauty and goodness, then (no

doubt in different ways), exert an effect upon man which cannot be explained

in terms of the world that we know, and to this we may add his search for

truth. He is not only wanting to know facts, though the careful dispassionate

amassing of ascertained facts is surely one of his most admirable activities,


but he also wants to find some meaning to the puzzle of life. Scientific

research, philosophy and religion, all in their different ways attest this

reaching out of man to grasp more and more truth. And yet—why should he?

Why should he not rest content with what he has and what he knows? Why

can he not accept death and evil and disease without worrying about them?

Why does he, in all ages and in all countries, reach out to find Something—

something which will harmonize and explain and complete life’s bewildering

phenomena? Here, too, is surely a pointer. Arguing, as we must, from what

we know to what we don’t know, we may fairly say that as food is the answer

to hunger, water the answer to thirst, and a mate to sexual desire, this

universal hunger for Truth is unlikely to be without its answer and fulfilment,

however hard to find it may be.

IS THERE A FOCUSED GOD?

Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, wherever they occur, are certainly clues; but

they seem to be like cameras focused “to infinity”—we cannot tell how far and

how great is the Reality to which they are pointing.

Now although everyone knows what is meant by Beauty, Goodness, and

Truth, it is impossible to visualize them as absolute values. We can visualize a

beautiful thing, but not beauty; a good man, but not goodness; a true fact, but

not truth. Yet once we have a beautiful thing held in our minds it is

comparatively easy to fill the mind with other beauties; once we consider a

truly good man, we can expand and develop his qualities until we begin to get

some idea of goodness; while if we are once convinced of a certain fact

(particularly if we have discovered it ourselves), we can at once think of a

world of truths—we begin to visualize the absolute quality of Truth.

We see beauty, then, when it is first focused for us in a beautiful thing;

goodness when it is focused in a good man; truth when it is focused in a fact

of which we are sure. Absolute values may exist as mental concepts for the


trained philosopher; but the ordinary man must see his values focused in

people or things that he knows before he can grasp them.

Let us now make a further step. The mystic claims to be able to grasp

something of God in the Absolute. But the mystic is even more uncommon

than the philosopher, and any attempt by the ordinary man to “imagine” God

results in nothing but the “vague oblong blur” complained of by those modern

people who make the attempt. Yet if a man can see God focused and be

convinced that he is seeing God, scaled-down but authentic, he can, as in the

case of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, add all the other inklings and

impressions that he has of the majesty, magnificence, and order of the Infinite

Being, and “see God.” But can he so see God “focused”? There must be more

than elusive sparks and flashes of the divine—there must be a flame burning

steadily so that its light can be examined and properly assessed.

It is a fascinating problem for us human beings to consider how the Eternal

Being—wishing to show men His own Character focused, His own Thought

expressed, and His own Purpose demonstrated—could introduce Himself into

the stream of human history without disturbing or disrupting it. There must

obviously be an almost unbelievable “scaling-down” of the “size” of God to

match the life of the planet. There must be a complete acceptance of the

space- and-time limitations of this present life. The thing must be done

properly—it must not, for example, be merely an act put on for man’s benefit.

If it is to be done at all, God must BE man. There could be no convincing

focusing of real God in some strange semi-divine creature who enjoys

supernatural advantages. Nor, though it is plain that many men have been

“inspired” to utter truth, to create beauty and to demonstrate goodness, could

it suffice for a unique and authentic focusing to depend on one “super-

inspired” man. For complete dependability, for universal appeal, for a

personally guaranteed authenticity to which all other truth is to be related, God

must do it Himself.


Suppose, then, that God does slip into the stream of history and is born as

Baby A.

A will, as far as the limitations of time, space, and circumstance allow, grow

up as God “focused” in humanity, speaking a language, expressing thoughts,

and demonstrating life in terms that men can understand. Having once

accepted A’s claim to be God expressing Himself in human terms, men will

have a great deal by which to live.

First, they will know now for certain what sort of “character” the eternal God

possesses. For He is certain to inform them that the man who observes Him is

observing God. Secondly, the facts about man and God, the perennial

anxieties about such things as pain and sin and death, the dim hopes of a

more permanent world to follow this one—these and scores of other clamant

questions will now have a fixed reference point, by which they can be adjusted

if not settled. Thirdly, man will be able to gain at first hand information as to

“what life is all about” and as to how he can co-operate with the Plan and the

Power behind time and space. Fourthly, if they are convinced, as we are

assuming, that the one before them is really God-become-man, they will be

able to observe something absolutely unique in the history of the world: God

Himself coping with life on the very terms that He has imposed upon His

creatures. They will be seeing God not seated high on a throne, but down in

the battlefield of life.

_A,_ of course, having genuinely entered the space-time world and having

become a human being, must enter at some particular time and must live in

some particular locality. He will thus, as far as some incidentals and externals

are concerned, be to some extent moulded, modified, and limited. He cannot,

therefore, be a FULL expression of God—there is neither time nor space

enough for that. But within the limit he sets himself, he will be a perfectly

genuine and adequate focusing of the nature of God. He will not only be

information and example, but the aperture through which men may see more


and more of God. If men are once convinced of the genuineness of his

extraordinary claim, they will probably find that God is, so to speak, visible

through an A-shaped aperture. Knowledge, experience, and appreciation, may

all expand enormously as the years pass, but that will not mean that men

“grow out of” God. For A will have supplied by his demonstration in time and

space one sure Fact, around which everything else of Truth, Goodness, and

Beauty, may be appropriately and satisfactorily crystallized.

IF GOD WERE FOCUSED (1)

If A, then, does enter the life of this planet, there will be certain phenomena

which would appear to be inevitable, unless (on a possibility we are not

considering) the normal rules of life are temporarily suspended. In the first

place, it is unlikely that A will be recognized as God in any real sense, at any

rate for some time. Men would almost certainly judge any alleged personal

appearance of God in life by two criteria. First, they would probably expect

some definitely numinous quality to be invariably present. They would expect

to feel frightened or to see an aura of divinity, or witness supernormal powers.

In other words, they would not expect God REALLY to be man, but only to be

pretending to be one—and that is not the same thing at all. God pretending to

be man could, for example, achieve all kinds of superhuman feats in the

moral, mental, spiritual, or even physical realm. That might impress, but it

would leave a man where he was before; he would be no nearer

UNDERSTANDING or knowing God. He might be dazzled, but he would

remain unilluminated. Secondly, men would almost certainly, if the first

possibility did not occur, expect to see a “holy-man” of the super-mystic type,

someone whose wisdom is too profound for words and whose eyes are too

intent upon heavenly realities to be au fait with the commonplace world. If A

then is revealed as a perfectly adjusted, wholesome, sane, and non-fanatical

man, his claim to be God (which he must make in due course, unless

someone suddenly grasps the truth) will be looked upon as fantastic and


blasphemous. If A makes his appearance among those who have so exalted

their conception of God that for Him ever to wear the soiled robe of sinful

humanity is an unthinkable degradation of his Godhead, the task for A will be

immeasurably harder. But if he appears among those who have always

thought that there was some hint of God in the character of man, then some at

least may well see what is happening. It would be those who depreciate or

even despise humanity in order to exalt their idea of God who would in all

probability be completely blind to A’s identity.

Yet there will be, naturally, something about A in addition to a well-balanced

and wholesome personality. There will, for instance, be a certain tone of

authority—the quiet assurance of the expert speaking on his own subject—

when he speaks of the basic facts of life, of man, and of God. Unless their

inklings and intuitions are all wrong, men will find, probably not without

emotion, that in A’s teaching is the quiet logical assembly of all the isolated

flashes of insight that they have ever experienced. “What this man is saying,”

some of them at least are bound to feel, “is true. This is reality. This is what

we have always hoped God would be like, and this is what we have always

felt that life should be like.” For unless this is a completely insane world or a

hopelessly evil one, A’s words must strike an answering chord in the hearts of

many ordinary people.

It will not of course be only A’s words that tell. If he is to enjoy no supernatural

advantages, he will get his share of trouble and temptation, trial and

disappointment, and his reactions to these, as well as to every other part of

life, pleasant or unpleasant, will produce a certain definite impression. He will

be revealing a character. Whether his friends and observers realize it at the

time or not, he will be showing them not only the character of the Invisible God

focused and functioning in ordinary human circumstances, but an example of

perfect humanity. What actually happens to him will of course depend on

when and where God decides on this insertion of Himself into history, but in a

sense it would always be the same, for the Character expressed in human


terms will be the same and the Example will always follow the same pattern.

This is an important point, for it makes the demonstration, provided that there

is an accurate record of it available, of universal value. The personal invasion

need not be continually repeated.

We may reasonably surmise that, the world being what it is, there will be other

reactions than the glad recognition of A’s teaching as true. For in practice men

do not by any means always “love the highest when they see it,” and truth is

not always a welcome visitor. We could probably therefore credibly forecast a

good deal of opposition and misrepresentation. These things we should

certainly look for in A’s visit:

1. Challenge to current moral values, and possibly even some downright

reversals of conventional judgment. The love of money or position, the lust for

success, and the desire to keep all unpleasant matters safely out of sight,

warp the world’s judgment probably more than it knows. A’s values are

therefore likely to be found more than a trifle disconcerting, though probably

they will be dismissed as “fine ideals but wholly impracticable.”

2. A disturbing probing into motive rather than measurable performance. A,

seeing life from the true instead of the conventional point of view, will seem to

have disconcerting insight into what is normally concealed. This will make him

enemies as well as friends.

3. An insistence on real human values, and particularly on love of the right

kind. A will naturally see through the glamours and cleverness that fog many

people’s judgment, and will put his finger on the real problem of the world, i.e.,

that there is not enough love to go round. Most love is either turned in on itself

or restricted to a small selected circle. A will point out that Life, Reality, God,

and even consideration of their own safety, demand that men should learn to

extend the circle of their love and understanding. He will be certain to insist

that love toward God does not exist without love to fellow humanity.


4. An endorsement of humanity’s own groping toward truth. For example, true

love and self-sacrifice have always been the most deeply moving human

characteristics. A will probably show that this is because those who truly love

and those who give themselves for others are more nearly reflecting the

character of God than anyone else.

5. We may reasonably expect A’s endorsement also of our appreciation of the

loveliness of nature, of the touching grace of childhood and of the wholesome

beauty of family life. His ideals will certainly be higher than the finest of ours,

but they will not be fantastic or so wholly different from what we already know,

as to be unacceptable. The probable reaction of the honest man to A’s

revelation of the real truth will be: “This rings true. This is what in my secret

heart I have always known to be right and real.”

6. We need not expect that A, like some religious reformers of history, will go

about denouncing men as “miserable sinners.” Indeed there would be no need

of that. Insincerity always feels uncomfortable in the presence of sincerity,

unreality in the presence of reality and selfishness in the presence of Love.

We may expect then that in the presence of a morally complete man, a good

deal of spiritual discomfort will be spontaneously aroused, sometimes dully

and sometimes acutely. Some men would be stimulated to an intense hunger

for wholeness, but some would be angered and resentful and determined

either to get out of range of the cause of their discomfort or to get rid of it.

7. Then we might expect that there will be a conflict with the conventionally

religious. A is more likely to have trouble here than anywhere, for he will be

right up against false gods, self-righteousness, “quid pro quo” religion, and

particularly those who have divorced religious life from real living, and are now

only “playing a part” instead of living life on the human level.


8. We could certainly expect a call to all who will listen, to re-centre their lives

on the real God, instead of on things or on themselves. Men, especially

worldly-minded men, will probably conclude that A is now calling them

“miserable sinners” and telling them to “repent.” In fact he will be almost

imploring them to “look at life differently”—as he knows it really is—with God

the centre and all else derived from Him.

IF GOD WERE FOCUSED (II)

All this, and a great deal more than we can vaguely imagine, would certainly

meet A and, if he is, as we have supposed, really human, would be heart-

breaking. For he would be in the position of a man seeing the truth and yet

largely unable to make other men see it. He would see them blind on their

God-ward side and drifting farther and farther away from reality. To a sensitive

man, this would prove an agony: naturally we cannot imagine what it would

mean to God-become-man.

We can imagine A then as a fully human figure, not floating ethereally in a

mystical atmosphere, but with his feet solidly on the earth. His foursquareness

to life, his joy in beauty and all good things, his spontaneous love of men and

women, will no doubt shock some men as much as his new viewpoint,

standards, and values. They could perhaps tolerate a saintly other-worldly

figure, who never sees any harm in anyone, claiming to be God in human

form; but for a real man, who seems to be the embodiment of all that is truly

human, as well as being quite plainly en rapport with the hidden meaning of

life, to claim to be God is a very shocking thing. Eyes that penetrate life’s little

disguises, a tongue that expresses truth in a peculiarly undiluted and

memorable form, a personality without the slightest fear and yet quite

obviously filled with the highest kind of love—these are formidable things to

meet, even for the best of men.


The world frequently conspires to muzzle or destroy its truest seers. The way

of the prophet and reformer has usually been hard and not infrequently fatal.

There is no reason to suppose that any different fate will be the lot of A

(always assuming, of course, that he has bound himself not to accept celestial

intervention). Indeed, just because this is It, real Truth, real Goodness, real

Beauty, real God focused in human form, it is not unreasonable to imagine

that all the truth-hating and self-loving spiritual powers will join forces against

this unwelcome intruder. Misrepresentation, slander, the dead-weight of age-

long custom and authority, false propaganda—all these weapons will be used

against A. He will, if he proves, as he must, unrepentant and incorruptible,

suffer the full impact of evil. He will probably get imprisoned, he may even get

sentenced to death on some fantastic charge. If this happened, it would, of

course, be an ironical situation without parallel in the history of the world! God

plans and engineers a Personal visit to His own world, and the reaction of the

world is to get rid of Him! Of course this is only one side of the picture. There

would probably be many who saw what A was driving at, and who were deeply

stirred by his personality and life. There would probably be not a few who

would little by little see that his fantastic claim to be God might well be true.

However long or short his career as a teacher of Truth might be, something of

what he said and did would be memorized or committed to writing, and even if

he were hustled off to a concentration camp, or judicially murdered, the truth

would remain. Probably a few who really did see the significance of the human

being with whom they had lived and worked and talked, and who grasped the

enormous value of his teaching to mankind, would attempt to tell the world.

But without being unduly cynical, we might reasonably conclude that a world

which would not accept the leadership of God when it was right before their

faces in an understandable form, would not, except for a small minority, take

very seriously the claims of a handful of devotees of a man who was dead.

HAS A ARRIVED?


Quite a number of people in all parts of the world have come to the conclusion

that the hypothetical A has appeared in history—that A in fact equals the man

Jesus, who was born in Palestine some nineteen centuries ago. Most of the

possibilities that we have suggested might occur if God were to enter this

world humanly, and historically were, they feel reasonably certain, fulfilled in

the life and teaching of Jesus. And there were some remarkable additional

features which could hardly have been surmised, and which we will consider

in due course.

It is, of course, a very big step intellectually (and emotionally and morally as

well, it will be found) to accept this famous figure of history as the designed

focusing of God in human life. It is not made any easier by the clinging mass

of sentimentality, superstitious reverence, and traditional associations which

surround Him. It is emphatically not an easy matter for the honest modern

mind to pierce the accretions and irrelevancies and see the Person, the

Character—particularly as the records, though they have been examined far

more closely than any other historic documents, are undeniably meagre.

Further, many people who have a vague childish affection for a half-

remembered Jesus, have never used their adult critical faculties on the matter

at all. They hardly seem to see the paramount importance of His claim to be

God. Yet if for one moment we imagine the claim to be true, the mind almost

reels at its significance. It can only mean that here is Truth, here is the

Character of God, the true Design for life, the authentic Yardstick of values,

the reliable confirming or correcting of all gropings and inklings about Beauty,

Truth, and Goodness, about this world and the next. Life can never be wholly

dark or wholly futile if once the key to its meaning is in our hands.

Although an honest adult study of the available records is essential, to decide

that Jesus really was the embodiment of God in a human being is not a

merely intellectual decision. Our unconscious minds will sense (even if the

conscious mind does not) that to accept such a unique Fact cannot but affect

the whole of our life. We may with complete detachment study and form a


judgment upon a RELIGION, but we cannot maintain our detachment if the

subject of our inquiry proves to be God Himself. This is, of course, why many

otherwise honest intellectual people will construct a neat by-pass around the

claim of Jesus to be God. Being people of insight and imagination, they know

perfectly well that once to accept such a claim as fact would mean a

readjustment of their own purposes and values and affections which they may

have no wish to make. To call Jesus the greatest Figure in History or the

finest Moral Teacher the world has ever seen commits no one to anything. But

once to allow the startled mind to accept as fact that this man is really

focused-God may commit anyone to anything! There is every excuse for

blundering in the dark, but in the light there is no cover from reality. It is

because we strongly sense this, and not merely because we feel that the

evidence is ancient and scanty, that we shrink from committing ourselves to

such a far-reaching belief as that Jesus Christ was really God.

But of course we are not entirely at the mercy of our own disinclination to

commit ourselves! We want to satisfy our cravings for reality, we want to know

the meaning of life and to have spiritual fundamentals upon which we may

build a faith by which to live. We want, in short, to know God. Jesus Christ

gave three remarkable indications by which men could KNOW (not by

scientific “proof,” but by an inward conviction that is perfectly valid to him in

whom it arises) that His claim and His revelation are true. They are contained

in three sayings of His which are all well known to anyone even moderately

familiar with the Gospels:

(a) If any man will do his (i.e. God’s) will, he shall know of the doctrine,

whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself. (John 7:17)

(b) He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. (John 14:9)

(c) I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by

me. (John 14:6)


These three sayings, especially the last two, are intolerably arrogant if they

come from a purely human morel teacher, but they must inevitably be said by

A or Jesus Christ if He is really God. Let us consider their significance:

(a) Jesus says, in effect, that there will be no inward endorsement of the truth

of the way of living he puts forward as the right one until a man is prepared to

do the will, i.e., co-operate with the purpose, of God. This at once rules out

armchair critics of Christianity and any dilettante appraisal of its merits. “You

can’t know,” says Christ, “until you are willing to do.”

It is plain from the Gospels that Christ regarded the self-loving, self-regarding,

self-seeking spirit as the direct antithesis of real living. His two fundamental

rules for life were that the “love-energy,” instead of being turned in on itself,

should go out first to God and then to other people. “If any man will come after

me,” he said, “let him deny himself (i.e. deny his tendency to love himself) and

take up his cross (i.e. bear the painful cost of that denial) and follow me (i.e.

live positively according to the principles that I teach and demonstrate).” Now

the moment a man does this, even temporarily and tentatively, he finds

himself in touch with something more REAL than he has known before.

There is a sense that he is touching a deep and powerful stream that runs

right through life. In other words, the moment he begins really to love, he finds

himself in touch with the life of God. (And, of course, if God IS love, this is

only to be expected.) He now KNOWS beyond any doubting that this is real,

happy, constructive living. He knows now that the teaching of Christ is not a

merely human code of behaviour, but part of the stuff of reality. He may

deliberately seek this way of living, he may touch it by accident or even by

force of necessity (as for instance when a selfish husband is shaken out of his

selfishness by having to minister to a sick wife): and of course he may relapse

into his former way of self-loving. But all the time he was approximating to the

living purpose of God he KNEW that this was real life. This, of course, may


baffle and even infuriate the detached critic, but it is a pragmatic, universal

test whose validity cannot fairly be denied.

(b) Christ unquestionably claims to present accurately and authentically the

Character of God. As we have seen above, he cannot present the WHOLE of

God, but he can present in human form a Character that may be understood,

admired, loved, respected—or even feared and hated. Those who accept this

claim find that he is the aperture through which the immensity and

magnificence of God can be begun to be seen. Nothing that science reveals,

nothing that all the complexity of modern thought can demand in its

conception of God, either outstrips or outmodes the Character that has been

revealed. It would indeed be a mistake to suppose that the eternal God is no

“bigger” than Jesus of Nazareth, limited as He was by time and space and

circumstance. But the biggest, widest, and highest ideas of God that mind can

conceive arrange themselves without dissonance or incongruity around the

Character Jesus revealed. Again we have no scientific “proof” of this. But

whereas those who reject the claim of Jesus have to manufacture, and

strenuously uphold by continual mental effort, a nebulous God of ultimate

values, those who accept the claim find, possibly to their surprise, that without

effort God becomes real and “knowable.”

(c) If Jesus Christ was God He must say that He is the way, the truth and the

life, or words of equivalent meaning, and we find He adds as a matter of

unalterable fact that no one comes into contact with God except through Him.

This is the third empirical test. Do people in fact know God except through

Christ? It is certainly possible that some stumble on Christ’s way of living,

even on Christ’s Spirit, without realizing quite where they are. But it is very

significant that those who reject Christ’s claim as fantastic, or even ignore it,

DO NOT KNOW GOD; whereas many simple people with little theology or

philosophy do find that they “know God” when they give their confidence to the

Character that they can trust and love. It is at least possible that a good deal

of the scoffing of the superior intellectual at “simple faith” springs from a


certain envy. The detached intellectual who will not commit himself knows in

his secret heart that he does not know God, indeed may be a million miles

from Him for all he knows. Yet the man who has accepted the claim of the

“focused God” finds God a living reality, and argument and scorn will,

naturally, alike leave him cold.

It is therefore clear that to accept the claim of Christ after proper and careful

thought is not entirely a leap into the dark. For the very decision will, as

thousands have proved, carry with it an incontrovertible inner endorsement

that is worth any amount of argument.

LIFE’S BASIC PRINCIPLES

It is by no means easy to make an accurate summary of the Character and

Truth revealed by Jesus Christ, even if we do not omit those parts of the

records which we personally think distasteful or discordant. In this “Christian”

country, we nearly all have some pre-conceived, even though vague, idea of

the Christ-character, and we need to be on our guard against “reading back”

into His deeds and words what is already in our minds about Him. Men have

tamed and modified and “explained” so much of His message that a great deal

of its edge has been blunted. Nor does our reverence for the superb literary

quality of the familiar Authorized Version do anything but hinder. Truth that

should be regarded as FACT comes to be regarded as “a beautiful thought”:

at best it is “a religious truth” rather than a reliable and workable fact on which

to act and build. A “fact” of psychological research or of medical science for

example is accepted by the mind as being more “true” than a statement of

Christ. Yet if Christ was God, it should be the other way round. It may help,

therefore, to re-state the basic principles of Jesus Christ in somewhat

unfamiliar form.

The truth taught by Jesus Christ is the right way to live. It is not primarily a

religion, not even the best religion, but God Himself explaining in terms that


men can readily grasp how life is meant to be lived. Naturally, since there is a

God and life is His idea, and since “religion” is by definition what connects

man and God, there will be a religious flavour to the matter, but we shall fall

into a familiar error if we fail to see that Christ is giving direction to the whole

of life, and is not Himself, as we so often are, dividing off a particular section

and calling it “religious.” If we accept Christ’s claim to be God, we have a right

to expect that certain basic facts will be told us on His authority. So that at any

rate it becomes possible for us to be intelligent and willing co-operators with

that whole Scheme of Things which we call Life. Here then are our basic

requirements, put into the form of simple questions:

1. WHAT SORT OF PERSON IS GOD?

Christ’s answer is quite unequivocal. He is “the Father.” When we hear this

familiar truth, we nearly always read back into God’s Character what we know

of fatherhood. This is understandable enough, but it reverses the actual truth.

If God is “the Father,” in Nature and Character and Operation, then we derive

(if we are parents) our characteristics from Him. We are reproducing, no doubt

on a microscopic scale and in a thoroughly faulty manner, something of the

Character of God. If once we accept it as true that the whole Power behind

this astonishing Universe is of that kind of character that Christ could only

describe as “Father,” the whole of life is transfigured. If we are really seeing in

human relationships fragmentary and faulty but real reflections of the Nature

of God, a flood of light is immediately released upon all the life that we can

see. People and our relationships with them, at once become of tremendous

importance. Much of life is seen to be merely its setting, its stage, its “props”—

the BUSINESS of it is on the realm of personality: it is people not things that

matter. It is thus quite impossible to divorce Christianity from life. Those who

attempted to divorce the religion of their day from ordinary life were called by

Christ, “play-actors” (hypocrites), i.e. they were acting a part and not really

living at all.


2. WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF LIFE?

Christ did not give an answer to this question in its modern cynical form which

implies, “Is it worth living at all?” but He did answer those who wanted to know

what to do with the vitality, affections, and talents, with which they were

endowed. He also answered those who already saw intuitively that this

present life was transitory and incomplete and wanted to know how to be

incorporated into the main timeless Stream of Life itself. The questions are

really much the same. In both cases, men wanted to know how they could be

at one with Life’s real purpose. And of course they still do. He said that there

were really two main principles of living on which all true morality and wisdom

might be said to depend. The first was to love God with the whole of a man’s

personality, and the second to love his fellow men as much and in the same

way as he naturally loved himself. If these two principles were obeyed, Christ

said that a man would be in harmony with the Purpose of Life, which

transcends time.

These two principles, one of which deals with the Invisible and Unchanging,

the other with the visible and variable, cover the total relationships of a man’s

life. Christ made them intensely practical and indissolubly connected. The

expression of love for God did not lie in formal piety nor in mystical

contemplation, but in obedience to what He believed to be the will of God,

which very often meant, in fact, the succouring and service of other men. A

man could not be “friends with” God on any other terms than complete

obedience to Him, and that included being “friends with” his fellow men. Christ

stated emphatically that it was quite impossible in the nature of things for a

man to be at peace with God and at variance with his neighbour. This

disquieting fact is often hushed up, but it is undeniable that Christ said it, and

the truth of it is enshrined (or should we say more properly embalmed) in the

petition for forgiveness in the all-too-familiar “Lord’s Prayer.”


The purpose of Life would seem to be the gradual winning of men to a willing

loyalty to these two principles, the establishing of the Rule of God. Christ

labelled the first one “primary and most important,” probably because unless

principles and values are first established by loving the true God, there will not

be “enough love to go round.” The world would go on loving its own selected

circle, despising, exploiting or hating those outside it unless their hearts were

first attuned to “the Father.” Those who have exalted the second principle to

the neglect of the first have again and again proved the wisdom of Christ’s

choice of their order.

3. WHAT IS REALLY WRONG WITH THE WORLD?

This is an extremely important question if only because it is asked so often

and answered in so many different ways. Christ answered it, not directly, but

quite plainly by implication. It is here, in diagnosis, that it is perhaps most

important of all to realize the paramount authority of what Christ said. None of

us thinks or speaks or feels without bias, and all of us are prone to fit facts to

a theory. Christ had no bias and no theory; He came to give us the facts, and

they are quite plainly, that this “power-to-love” which He recommended should

be expended on God and other people, has been turned in on itself. The basic

problems of happiness are not intellectual, but emotional. It is “out of the

heart,” according to Christ, that there proceed all those things which spoil

relationships whether between individuals or between groups of people.

It is obvious, if we accept Christ’s two great principles, that “sin” will lie in the

refusal to follow them. To Christ, the most serious sin was not the misdirection

of the love-energy, which might be due to ignorance or mere carelessness,

but the deliberate refusal to allow it to flow out either to God or to other

people. This accounts for some of His surprising reversals of conventional

moral judgment. It was pride and self-righteousness and the exploitation of

others which called forth His greatest anger. Self-love in fact He saw as the


archenemy. It was this which must be recognized and deliberately killed if a

man were to follow His way of constructive love.

A few moments’ thought will show us how true was His insight. While there is

no “sin” that we can name which does not spring from love of self, yet the sins

which do most damage and cause most suffering are those which have the

highest content of self-love. Christ’s time, in the circumstances, was short and

He wasted none of it in dealing with mere symptoms. It was with the motive

and attitude of the heart, i.e. the emotional centre, that He was concerned. It

was this that He called on men to change, for it is plain that once the inner

affections are aligned with God, the outward expression of the life will look

after itself.

4. WHAT SORT OF PEOPLE DOES GOD INTEND MEN TO BE?

To this question, Christ gave an explicit answer which, if considered seriously,

is a real shock to the mind. He gave a complete reversal of conventional

values and ambitions, though many people miss this undoubted fact because

of the poetic form and archaic language of what are now called the

“Beatitudes.” This revolutionary character becomes apparent at once,

however, if we substitute the word “happy” for the word “blessed” (which is

perfectly fair), and if we paraphrase the familiar cadences of the Authorized

Version and put the thoughts more into the form in which we normally accept

facts and definitions. We may further throw their real character into relief by

contrasting each “beatitude” with the normal view of the man of the world

throughout the centuries. We can do it like this:

Most people think:

Happy are the pushers: for they get on in the world.

Happy are the hard-boiled: for they never let life hurt them.


Happy are they who complain: for they get their own way in the end.

Happy are the blasé: for they never worry over their sins.

Happy are the slave drivers: for they get results.

Happy are the knowledgeable men of the world: for they know their way

around.

Happy are the troublemakers: for people have to take notice of them.

Jesus Christ said:

Happy are those who realize their spiritual poverty: they have already entered

the kingdom of Reality.

Happy are they who bear their share of the world’s pain: in the long run they

will know more happiness than those who avoid it.

Happy are those who accept life and their own limitations: they will find more

in life than anybody.

Happy are those who long to be truly “good”; they will fully realize their

ambition.

Happy are those who are ready to make allowances and to forgive: they will

know the love of God.

Happy are those who are real in their thoughts and feelings: in the end they

will see the ultimate Reality, God.


Happy are those who help others to live together: they will be known to be

doing God’s work.

It is quite plain that Christ is setting up ideals of different quality from those

commonly accepted. He is outlining the sort of human characteristics which

may fairly be said to be co-operating with the purpose of Life, and He is by

implication exposing the conventional mode of living which is at heart based

on self-love and leads to all kinds of unhappiness.

It should be noticed that this “recipe” for happy and constructive living is of

universal application. It cuts across differences of temperament and variations

in capacity. It outlines the kind of character which is possible for ANY man,

gifted or relatively ungifted, strong or weak, clever or slow in the uptake. Once

more we find Christ placing His finger not upon the externals, but upon the

vital internal attitude.

It should also be noted that although we have called His definitions

“revolutionary,” they are not fantastic. Indeed a great many people would

probably realize that in following them men would become their real selves

and not the greedy, competitive, self-loving characters that cause so many of

the world’s troubles. Christ is restoring the true order, which man can

recognize as true, He is not imposing a set of arbitrary regulations.

5. WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF PAIN AND DISEASE, INJUSTICE AND

EVIL?

We find Christ accepting these things, which many people advance as the

greatest hindrance to religious faith, as part of the stuff of life. He did not

pretend that they do not exist: He coped with them personally by restoring,

wherever possible, the true order of health, sanity, and constructive goodness.

He made no promise that those who followed Him in His plan of re-

establishing life on its proper basic principles would enjoy special immunity


from pain and sorrow—nor did He himself experience such immunity. He did,

however, promise enough joy and courage, enough love and confidence in

God to enable those who went His way to do far more than survive. Because

they would be in harmony with the very Life and Spirit of God, they would be

able to defeat evil. They would be able to take the initiative and destroy evil

with good.

Although Christ gave no explicit explanation of the existence of pain and evil

in the world, He gave certain implied facts which are well worth our serious

consideration.

(a) The “breaking of the rules” means suffering. The operation of self-love on

a huge scale, which means a wholesale breaking of His two fundamental rules

for human life, cannot but mean a highly complex and widespread “infection”

of suffering. Men are not isolated units, and their every action in some degree

affects other people. The multiplication of the effects of countless acts by

millions of self-centred, instead of God-centred, individuals may reasonably be

thought to be destroying the world. The only way of being rescued from the

vicious sin-suffering-death circle in which the world is involved is for men to

re-centre their lives on God. This they can do by deliberately giving their

confidence to the Character which Christ exhibited in person and thereby

seeing that real living, in harmony with God, lies in following Him and His

basic principles.

There is thus no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy

road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by

winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living. Most

people, he said, were drifting along the broad road of conventional standards

which has in it the threat of destruction. The narrow road of following the basic

rules which, because it is in harmony with God, is not affected by what we call

death, was being followed by comparatively few. His plan of rescue (or


salvation, to use a much misused word) had to begin with a tiny minority. They

were to be the spearhead of good against evil.

(b) Christ definitely spoke of a power of spiritual evil, and, using the language

of His contemporaries, He called this power “Satan,” “the Devil,” or “the Evil

One.” Now whatever mystery lies behind the existence of such an evil spiritual

power—whether we accept a Miltonic idea of a fallen angelic power or

whether we conceive the evil spirit in the world as arising out of the cumulative

effects of centuries of selfish living—there can be no blinking the fact that

Christ spoke, and acted, on the assumption that there is a power of evil

operating in the world. If we accept as fact His claim to be God, this must

make us think seriously. We are so accustomed by modern thought to regard

evil as “error,” as the “growing pains” of civilization, or simply as an

inexplicable problem, that once more the mind does not readily accept what is

in effect God’s own explanation—that there is a spirit of evil operating in the

world. We find Christ speaking quite plainly of this spirit as responsible for

disease and insanity as well as being the unremitting enemy of those who

want to follow the new, true order.

Modern man has a lust for full explanation and habitually considers himself in

no way morally bound unless he is in full possession of all the facts. Hence, of

course, the prevalence of non-committal agnosticism. Yet it would seem that

Christ, God-become-Man, did not give men a full explanation of the origin and

operation of the evil forces in this world. (It is perfectly possible that in our

present space-time existence, we could not comprehend it, anyway.) But He

did recognize evil as evil, not as a mere absence of good: He did, wherever

He found it possible, destroy evil. He did indicate the lines along which evil

could be defeated and He did talk of the positive resources which would be

necessary for such defeat, and these we must consider a little later.

FURTHER BASIC QUESTIONS


WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT SIN AND FORGIVENESS?

Sooner or later this question in some form or other must be asked and

answered. For the problem of imperfect man’s safe approach to the Moral

Perfection of God is the business of every religion worthy of the name.

Because most people in this modern age have almost no sense of God, there

is also almost no sense of “sin”—for in human experience there is a significant

connection between the two. Where the sense of God becomes something

like a reality, there springs up, sooner or later, a sense of guilt and failure.

This is equally true of the most primitive as well as of the most highly

developed religions of mankind. And where there is this sense of sin, there is

a deeply rooted conviction that “something ought to be done about it.” Animal,

even human, sacrifices, propitiatory offerings of various kinds and acts of

ceremonial cleansing—all testify to the desire to “do something” to bridge the

moral gulf between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man.

A great deal of sentimental (i.e. unreal) stuff has been spoken and written

about the matter of sin and forgiveness, and we must therefore clear our

minds a little more before we see the significance of what Christ had to say

about this very important subject. Let us start, then, by making these

observations.

1. WE ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH “ARTIFICIAL” GUILT OR SIN.

In the first part of this book, we considered how conscience could make a man

feel guilty simply because certain standards and taboos had been established

in his mind and he had failed to “toe the line.” All religions, Christianity

unfortunately not excepted, tend to excite in certain people this artificial sense

of guilt, which may have little or no connection with a man’s actual standing

before God. Probably Pharisaism, which Christ attacked with bitter scorn,

represents this tendency at its highest, but it is a mistake to think that

Pharisaism disappeared after the death of Christ. The danger of such a


system, and the reason why Christ attacked it so violently, is that its values

are artificial. The proud and correct feel “right with God” just when they are

not, and the sensitive humble man feels hopeless and overburdened FOR

THE WRONG REASONS. (Christ’s little cameo of the Pharisee and the tax-

collector at their prayers is an unforgettable commentary on this point.)

2. WE ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH MERE COMPARISON WITH

PERFECTION.

We have already spoken in the first part of this book of the dangers of

worshipping “one hundred per cent” as God. A great deal of the sense of sin

and shame and guilt induced in certain types of people is simply due to their

(imaginary) comparison of their human standards with what they conceive to

be the Divine Standards. Of course they feel failures! You have only to raise

the standard, and go on raising it, to make anyone feel a hopeless blundering

idiot. This may be what we are in comparison with the wisdom of God, but, to

put it at its crudest, it would be an extraordinarily ungentlemanly thing for Him

merely to keep raising the standard! After all, it is a foregone conclusion that

no man can compete with his Creator, and there is neither sense nor justice in

thinking that the Creator intends His creatures to feel permanently inferior and

humiliated compared with Himself! Yet this comparison, cloaked and

disguised, is often made in a certain type of sermon and a certain type of

religious book. But the feeling of hopelessness and inadequacy it engenders

is quite wrongly taken to be “conviction of sin.”

3. WE ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH MERE HUMILIATION.

Quite a lot of people, if psychologically tested, would react with resentment to

the words “sin,” “guilt,” “disobedience,” “punishment,” and so on. This is by no

means necessarily because their adult lives are so proud and complacent that

they resent criticism, but because there still exists in their minds a tender,

touchy area connected with the misdemeanours of childhood. Unless they


were exceptionally lucky it is quite probably that, though they have long ago

forgotten the circumstances, they still half-consciously remember the shame,

rage, impotence, and humiliation of childish naughtiness and its punishment. It

was not without strain and conflict that they won free from adult domination,

and it FEELS to them like a voluntary resumption of the humiliations of

childhood to confess themselves “guilty sinners.” For a little boy to be

smacked on his behind may be of little significance, but for an adult man to be

beaten is an unspeakable degradation. It is of course not really a renascence

of this childish guilt and humiliation that the reputable evangelist seeks to

arouse, but he may seem to be doing so. To have a real sense of sin is by no

means the same thing as being humiliated.

The true adult sense of sin, guilt, and shame, which contact with the real God

appears invariably to arouse (though by no means always at once), seems to

come along at least four different lines, which we will attempt to illustrate.

(a) We will suppose that a man who is rather proud of his ability to knock off a

quick effective little painting discovers a bit of canvas fastened to a wall. For

his own pleasure and the appreciation of his friends he rapidly paints in a

bright, effective and amusing little picture. Stepping back to see his own

handiwork better, he suddenly discovers that he has painted his little bit of

nonsense on the corner of a vast painting of superb quality, so huge that he

had not realized its extent or even that there was a picture there at all. His

feelings are rather like what a man feels when he suddenly sees the vast

sweep of God’s design in life, and observes the cheap and discordant little

effort his own living so far represents when seen against that background.

That is real conviction of sin.

(b) To illustrate the second way in which a real sense of sin may come, we will

use a story which we believe is true, though it has not been possible to check

its source. A young man of the “incorrigible” variety grows up work-shy, and by

a certain native quickness of wit manages for years to escape serious trouble.


His favourite saying is: “I live my own life, and I don’t care tuppence for

anybody.” Eventually, however, his self-confidence overreaches itself and he

is convicted of serious crime and goes to prison for three years. While in

prison, he is hard and quite unrepentant. “What I did with my life,” he says

defiantly, “is nobody else’s business. I shan’t make the same mistake twice.”

In due course he leaves prison and, since he has nowhere else to go, decides

to spend a few nights at home while he “looks around.” He hasn’t seen his

mother since he saw her, plump, rosy, and tearful, out of the corner of his eye,

at his trial. But when the door of his home is opened to him by a worn, grey-

haired old woman, he does not see at once what has happened. For a second

or two he simply stares, then he cries, “Oh, mother, what HAVE I DONE TO

YOU?” and bursts into the tears that neither punishment nor prison had ever

wrung from him.

This story is simply an illustration of how a man may suddenly realize the hurt

he does to others by his own self-centeredness. It does not, unfortunately,

often happen that a man sees as vividly as in that story the consequences of

his wrong actions. But when he does he may experience a genuine conviction

of sin. When Saul Kane in Masefield’s _Everlasting Mercy_ had his eyes

opened, he suddenly saw “the harm I done in being me.” That is just it. When

a man sees not merely that his life is out of harmony with God’s purpose, but

realizes that that disharmony has injured and infected the lives of other

people, he begins to feel a “sinner” in earnest.

(c) To illustrate the next point we must tell a simple story which will no doubt

make the sophisticated smile. Two young men of the same age choose

divergent paths. A is determined to squeeze all the pleasure and enjoyment

out of life that he can. B is equally determined to “get on.” Despite the gibes of

his friend, he attends “evening classes” and works hard in his spare time at

his chosen subject. We will suppose that the friends go separate ways and do

not meet for several years. When they do, B has unquestionably “got on” and

has a responsible well-paid position. A has advanced very little. His reaction


on seeing B again may quite possibly be just unreasonable envy, but equally

possibly A may say to himself: “What a fool I’ve been” What opportunities I

threw away. B is JUST THE SORT OF MAN I COULD HAVE BEEN!”

This naive little tale illustrates quite well how a genuine “conviction of sin” may

arise. A man who has lived selfishly and carelessly meets someone who has

plainly found happiness and satisfaction in co-operating with what he can see

of God’s purpose. The former may pass the whole thing off as a joke. “Of

course, old so-and-so always was a bit religious”—but he may quite possibly

see in the other man THE SORT OF PERSON HE HIMSELF MIGHT HAVE

BEEN. The standards he mocked and the God he kept at arm’s length have

produced in the other man something he really very badly wants. If his

reflection is, “What a fool I’ve been,” he, too, is beginning to get a genuine

sense of sin.

(d) The fourth road along which the “conviction of sin” may come is rather

harder to explain. It is really the discovery of the enormous and implacable

strength of real goodness and real love. The insincere man hates and fears

the real truth: the sexually irresponsible man affects to be cynical about real

and enduring passion, but secretly he hates and fears it: the egocentric man

hates and fears the incalculable force of the personality selflessly devoted to a

cause. In short, self-centred and evil people really FEAR the good. They

express their fear by mockery, cynicism, and, when circumstances allow, by

active persecution.

Now when this sense of the strength of goodness and love touches a man,

whether it be by someone else’s life, by something he reads or sees, or by an

inner touch in his soul, he is really convicted of sin. He knows that sooner or

later the game is up—the Nature of Life is Good and not Evil. He suddenly

sees that the goodness and love he has despised as weakness are in reality

incredibly strong. Peter once felt this about Christ and in a moment of panic

cried out: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” Some people, of


course, succeed in keeping the fear of goodness (which is really the fear of

God) at a safe distance all their lives, but they live in continual danger of

reality breaking in. And when it does, there will be a strong sense of sin.

CHRIST AND THE QUESTION OF SIN

There are, of course, several other genuine ways in which a man feels a moral

failure before God. But however he may arrive at the point of realization he

will, sooner or later, realize what may be described as the bankruptcy of his

position. He sees, for instance, that his life has done harm to others, that he

has spoiled the Design, that he has played the fool with a good deal of his life.

He realizes, dimly perhaps, that he has offended against the Order of Things.

Yet there is nothing very much he can do about it. He can be sorry, and he

can apologize. He can resolve to do better in future. But if his sense of sin is

more than superficial, he will feel two things. First that some _rapprochement_

must be made between his sinful self and the moral perfection of God (and

here he may feel a passing sympathy with the almost universal idea of

sacrifice found in primitive religions). Secondly, he will need some assuring

that he can be, and is, accepted into fellowship with God. He wants,

desperately sometimes, to be in harmony with the meaning and purpose of

life, and yet he feels helpless to “make the atonement” that he senses is

necessary.

To anyone therefore who takes the unique claim of Christ seriously, it is of the

very greatest interest and significance to observe how He dealt with the

question of sin and man’s reconciliation with God. The following facts emerge

from the records:

(1) Christ very rarely called men “sinners” and as far as we know never

attempted deliberately to make them feel sinners, except in the case of the

entrenched self-righteous, where He used the assault and battery of scathing

denunciation. (This, we may surmise, is an instance of what He saw to be a


desperate ill requiring a desperate remedy.) Some evangelists, whose chief

weapon is the production of a sense of sin, would find themselves

extraordinarily short of ammunition if they were obliged to use nothing but the

recorded words of Christ. This is not, of course, to say that the life and words

of Christ did not produce that genuine sense of guilt and failure which is

outlined above, but it is undeniable that He did not set out to impress a sense

of sin on His hearers.

(2) We find Christ unequivocally claiming the right “to forgive sins,” but the

grounds on which the sin of man can be forgiven are not, in the recorded

words of Christ, the conventional ones presupposed by many Christians. We

find in Christ an intimate connection between the forgiveness of sins and the

existence of love in a man’s heart. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive

them that trespass against us” is so familiar in our ears that we hardly grasp

the fact that Christ joined fellowship with God and fellowship with other human

beings indissolubly. “Except ye from your hearts forgive everyone his

trespasses,” He is reported to have said after a particularly telling parable,

“neither will my heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.” Moreover, on

one occasion he said of a woman who was apparently something of a

notoriety that “her sins, WHICH ARE MANY, are forgiven: for she loved

much.” It seems to me consonant with Christ’s teaching to hold that love is a

prerequisite of forgiveness, and I take His consequent little story to the

Pharisee to be another of those apparent “non sequiturs” of which the reply to

the question “Who is my neighbour?” is a classic example.

On the other hand, it would seem that there is a possibility of a man’s putting

himself outside forgiveness by the “sin against the Holy Spirit.” This, from an

examination of the context, would appear to be a combination of refusing to

recognize truth and refusing to allow the heart to love others. If God Himself is

both Truth and Love, it would be logical to suppose that a deliberate refusal to

recognize or harbour truth and love would result in an attitude that makes

reconciliation with God impossible.


Now if it is true that God is both Truth and Love, it will readily be seen that the

greatest sins will be unreality, hypocrisy, deceit, lying, or whatever else we

choose to call sins against truth, and self-love, which makes fellowship with

other people and their proper treatment impossible. Forgiveness must then

consist in a restoration to Reality, i.e. Truth and Love.

(3) We must now ask whether Christ had anything to say about the clamant

question of “atonement” mentioned above. He certainly hinted at it. He spoke

of giving his life as “a ransom for many,” and at the last meal which He shared

with His followers He spoke of breaking His own body and shedding His own

blood “for the remission of sins.”

Now it is surely possible that to this question of atonement (as to the question

of surviving death) Christ, whom we are considering as God in human form,

could give the best and most complete answer by actual demonstration. He

personally, being both God and Man, effected the reconciliation that man

alone was powerless to make.

There are innumerable theories centring around the death of Christ as the

atonement for the world’s sins, and many of them frankly do not commend

themselves to the honest modern mind. May we suggest the following way of

looking at the matter.

We have already spoken of the vicious sin-suffering-death circle in which the

world is involved, and of the individual man’s helplessness to free himself from

the entanglement of his own wrong-doing, let alone cleanse himself from the

cumulative infection of the world’s selfish living.

Suppose now that God, who has become human and represents in one

person both His own Godhood and Humanity, allows Himself, though

personally guiltless, to be involved in the complex. God, now, who made the


inexorable rules of cause and effect, deliberately exposes Himself to the

consequences of the world’s self-love and sin. Because He is God, to do such

a thing once in time is indicative of an eternal attitude, and we view the

Character of God in an entirely different light if we see Him not abrogating

justice, not issuing a mandate of reversal of natural law and order, but

overcoming a repugnance which we cannot begin to imagine by letting Himself

BE Representative Man and suffering in His own Person the logical and

inevitable suffering and death which the world has earned. The Moral

Perfection which a man quite rightly dreads, has deliberately consented to

become under the limitations of humanity, the focal point of the assault of evil.

We cannot imagine what this would involve, but even to begin to think that it

might be true takes the breath away.

Christians believe that this act of reconciliation was the inner meaning behind

the rather sordid historical fact of Christ’s death. The unreality, the pseudo-

religion, the bitter hatred, the greed and jealousy that lay behind the judicial

murder of Christ were the mere SETTING. The FACT would have been the

same wherever and whenever Christ appeared: evil would clash with

Incarnate Good, and whether it was a cross, a hangman’s rope, a guillotine, or

a gas chamber, Christ would choose to accept death for humanity’s sake.

SATISFACTORY RECONCILIATION

We shall attempt here no theories of atonement, but simply record that it is a

matter of indisputable fact that when a man sees that God took the initiative in

establishing a _rapprochement_ between Himself and Man and underwent the

(for Him) indescribable ignominy of death, his attitude toward God is from then

on profoundly changed. The inarticulate but incurable sense that “something

ought to be done about it,” to which we referred above, is almost miraculously

set at rest. Though it may defeat his reason to define exactly what has been

done, a man knows that the “something” has been done. The idea of God,

which was almost certainly a discomfort and possibly a threat, however


reason might argue the point, is entirely changed. The former inevitable Judge

is seen to be Lover and Rescuer, and if the revision of ideas is at all sudden

there is bound to be a considerable emotional release.

To assent mentally to the suggestion that “Jesus died for me” is unhappily

only too easy for certain types of mind. But really to believe that God Himself

cut the knot of man’s entanglement by a personal and unbelievably costly act

is a much deeper affair. The bigger the concept of God, the more the mind

staggers at the thought, but once it is accepted as true, it is not too much to

say that the whole personality is reoriented. For most men in whom a moral

sense is operating at all, are, unconsciously perhaps, trying to “put up a case”

to justify their own conduct. The effort may only rarely reach the conscious

level of the mind, but it is there, and the real “conviction of sin” which we

defined above, however much it may be held at arm’s length, is always in the

offing. To realize that the effort to justify oneself, the hopeless effort to repay

the overdraft, can safely be abandoned, is an unspeakable relief. It was all

based on a false idea, that the central confidence of life should be in the self.

It is a blow to the face of pride and a wrench to the habits of the mind to

transfer that central confidence to the One Real Perfect Man, who was, and is,

also God. But if the change-over is effected, the relief and release are

enormous, and energy formerly repressed is set free. This is what the New

Testament means by being saved by faith in Christ.

This is, of course, far from being mere theory. People in all ages, of all

nations, and of widely differing temperaments, have reacted in much the same

way to Christ’s Act of Reconciliation. Indeed so great is the weight of evidence

that it would be sensible to admit that, if we cannot understand what

happened and are at a loss to explain it, there is a mystery here beyond our

powers of definition. We might even have the humility to say that God-

become-man did something incalculable, the greatness of which we can only

appreciate in a very limited degree.


But, though we may well be awed, we need not cease to use our minds, and

we cannot but admire the superb psychological accuracy with which this Act

was designed to touch the characters of men. Those who already to some

extent live in love and truth will see the force and point of the Act almost

intuitively. Those who are set, however secretly, in pride and self-love, will see

nothing to marvel at and little to admire—though the Act may haunt them

strangely as though it were the key to some long forgotten door into life’s real

meaning. It is those who realize their spiritual poverty who find in Christ’s Act

the way into fellowship with God: it is the “rich” who are “turned empty away.”

Nevertheless, although we have here a touchstone to reveal existing

character, we have a great deal more than that. Should the proud and self-

loving man once see that God is LIKE THAT, there may be, and sometimes is,

a revolution in his whole scale of values. Should the careless-living man once

see that this Act is a crystallizing in time of what is always happening—that

every kind of sin, including apathy, is at heart seeking to destroy God—he too

may see life with very different eyes. God may thunder His commands from

Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were

before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man, suffering,

tempted, sweating, and agonized—finally dying a criminal’s death, he is a

hard man indeed who is untouched. For Christ’s claim to be not only God but

Representative Man has had an almost incredible magnetic power. Over

nineteen centuries have passed since that judicial murder in that turbulent

little country of Palestine, yet still men see the Death as a personal matter. It

seems to be designed to meet their own half-conscious needs. “The Son of

God who loved ME and gave Himself for ME,” wrote St. Paul, as though for

the moment the Act affected him alone; but the words have been echoed

unprompted by an imposing number since his day. So wide has been the

acceptance of this reconciliation that we simply cannot easily dismiss it,

particularly as the only possible alternative way of thought is a simple denial of

the impasse which is a “fact” to every spiritually sensitive person.


DEMONSTRATION WITH THE ENEMY

We have mentioned above that Jesus Christ did not, as far as we know, say a

great deal about the question of sin and its forgiveness, but gave a complete

and satisfactory answer by personal demonstration. The same thing is true of

His reply to the other question which has always been in men’s minds: “Is

there life after death?” For although in His recorded teaching the existence of

a real world, unaffected by time and space, is assumed, the complete and

satisfactory answer to the question of whether a human being could survive

the universal experience of death was given by personal demonstration. An

observed historical fact, as in the case of the Act of Reconciliation, provided

the most effective reply to mankind’s questioning.

It is, of course, impossible to exaggerate the importance of the historicity of

what is commonly known as the Resurrection. If, after all His claims and

promises, Christ had died and merely lived on as a fragrant memory, He could

only be revered as an extremely good but profoundly mistaken man. His

claims to be God, His claims to be Himself the very principle of Life, would be

mere self-delusion. His authoritative pronouncements on the nature of God

and Man and Life would be at once suspect. Why should He be right about the

lesser things if He was proved completely wrong in the greater? It is perfectly

natural therefore that both Christians and anti-Christians should regard the

question of whether the Resurrection really took place as the fundamental

issue on which the whole Christian claim really depends. Argument on both

sides has been continuous and vehement for centuries, and it is not very likely

that at this distance from the event any fresh evidence, or even fresh opinion,

will emerge. It does not seem to be a matter that can be finally settled by the

most careful study or the most ingenious argument. The very lack of

chronological arrangement and careful mutual endorsement that characterizes

the stories of the Resurrection appears to one side as evidence of their

slipshod and even imaginative nature, while to the other the same things

seem to be the ingenuousness of those who were so convinced of what they


had seen that they had no need to build up a foolproof body of evidence.

Again, the fact that the recorded appearances were made only to those who

were “on Jesus’ side” is enough for one group to conclude that they are of

purely subjective value, while for the other it is plain proof that only those who

are at heart reconciled to God can even see the reality of Life once it is

detached from the present space-time limitations. We do not propose,

therefore, to attempt to marshal the arguments on one side or the other, but

merely to ask three questions which must in fairness be answered if the

historical fact of the Resurrection is rejected.

1. WHAT CHANGED THE EARLY DISCIPLES?

No fair reading of the records can deny that almost all the disciples of Jesus

deserted Him at the disaster of the Crucifixion, and that afterwards, with their

Leader dead and their hopes at zero, they were living in considerable personal

apprehension. Yet within a very short time we find them, quite a considerable

body of men, filled with an extraordinary courage and spiritual vitality, defying

the power of both pagan and Jewish authorities. They are proclaiming openly

that they had themselves seen Jesus alive, not once, but several times, after

His public execution, and calling all men to share their belief that this Man was

indeed God. Nor was this a short-lived spurt of defiant courage, but a steady

flame of conviction which baffled, embarrassed, and infuriated the authorities

for years as the movement began to spread throughout the then-known world.

It is surely straining credulity to bursting point to believe that this dramatic and

sustained change of attitude was founded on hallucination, hysteria, or an

ingenious swindle. We may thoroughly disapprove of the Christian faith, but it

is impossible to deny that the early Christians quite definitely believed that

they had seen, touched, handled, and conversed with Christ after He had

been crucified, taken down, and laid in a rock-hewn vault sealed and guarded

by Roman soldiers.

2. IF THE RESURRECTION DID NOT HAPPEN, WHO WAS CHRIST?


Many people, who have not read the Gospels since childhood, imagine that

they can quite easily detach the “miraculous” element of the Resurrection and

still retain Christ as an Ideal, as the best Moral Teacher the world has ever

known—and all the rest. But the Gospels, all four of them, bristle with

supernatural claims on the part of Christ, and unless each man is going to

constitute himself a judge of what Christ said and what He did not say (which

is not far from every man being his own evangelist), it is impossible to avoid

the conclusion that He believed Himself to be God and spoke therefore with

quite unique authority. Now if He believed thus and spoke thus and failed to

rise from the dead, He was, without question, a lunatic. He was quite plainly a

young idealist suffering from folie de grandeur (dreams of glory) on the

biggest possible scale, and cannot on that account be regarded as the World’s

Greatest Teacher. No Mahomet or Buddha or other great teacher ever came

within miles of making such a shocking boast about himself. Familiarity has

blinded many people to the outrageousness of Christ’s claim and traditional

reverence inhibits them from properly assessing it. If He did not in fact rise,

His claim was false, and He was a very dangerous personality indeed.

3. WHY ARE SO MANY CHRISTIANS SURE THAT CHRIST NOT ONLY

ROSE, BUT IS ALIVE TODAY?

Though this question may enrage the critic, it is a fair one. The common

experience of Christians of all kinds of temperaments and of a great many

nationalities for nineteen centuries cannot be airily dismissed. Men and

women by the thousands today are convinced that the One whom they serve

is not a heroic figure of the past, but a living Personality with spiritual

resources upon which they can draw. A man may find difficulty in writing a

poem, but if he cries, “Oh, William Shakespeare, help me!” nothing whatever

happens. A man may be terribly afraid, but if he cries, “Oh, Horatio Nelson,

help me!” there is no sort of reply. But if he is at the end of his moral

resources or cannot by effort of will muster up sufficient positive love and


goodness and he cries, “Oh, Christ, help me!” something happens at once.

The sense of spiritual reinforcement, of drawing spiritual vitality from a living

source, is so marked that Christians cannot help being convinced that their

Hero is far more than an outstanding figure of the past.

The fact that this conviction only comes to those who have centred their inner

confidence on Jesus Christ seems to rob it of all validity in the eyes of the

hostile critic. Yet if, by an effort of imagination such a critic would concede for

a moment that the claims of Christ were true, he must admit that the

phenomenon is logical. If Christ revealed the true way of living and offered

human beings the possibility of being in harmony with the Life of God (i.e.

“eternal life”), it must follow that anyone living in any other way is by that

continued action incapable of appreciating the quality of real living unless and

until he “takes the plunge” into it. A man may write and argue and even write

poems about human love, but he does not KNOW love until he is in it, and

even then his knowledge of it only grows as he discards his self-love and

accepts the pains and responsibilities as well as the joys of loving someone

else. “If any man will KNOW whether my teaching is human or divine truth,”

said Christ, “let him DO the will of God.”

Those who accept this penetrating challenge are convinced that Christ is

alive.

THE ABOLITION OF DEATH

The “focused” God, Jesus Christ, revealed to man not merely adequate

working-instructions for meeting life happily and constructively, but also the

means by which he could be linked with the timeless Life of God. “Heaven” is

not, so to speak, the reward for “being a good boy” (though many people

seem to think so), but is the continuation and expansion of a quality of life

which begins when a man’s central confidence is transferred from himself to

God-become-man. This “faith” links him here and now with truth and love, and


it is significant that Jesus Christ on more than one occasion is reported to

have spoken of “eternal life” as being entered into NOW, though plainly to

extend without limitation after the present incident that we call life. The man

who believes in the authenticity of His message and puts his confidence in it

already possesses the quality of “eternal life” (John 3:36, 5:24; 6:47, etc.) He

comes to bring men not merely “life,” but life of a deeper and more enduring

quality (John 10:10, 10:28; 17:8, etc.).

If we accept this we shall not be too surprised to find Christ teaching an

astonishing thing about physical death: not merely that it is an experience

robbed of its terror, but that as an experience IT DOES NOT EXIST AT ALL.

For some reason or other Christ’s words (which Heaven knows are taken

literally enough when men are trying to prove a point about pacifism or

divorce, for example) are taken with more than a pinch of salt when He talks

about the common experience of death as it affects the man whose basic trust

is in Himself: “If a man keep my saying HE SHALL NEVER SEE DEATH”

(John 8:51); “Whosoever liveth and believeth on Me SHALL NEVER DIE”

(John 11:26). It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the meaning that

Christ intended to convey was that death was a completely negligible

experience to the man who had already begun to live life of the eternal quality.

“Jesus Christ hath abolished death,” wrote Paul many years ago, but there

have been very few since his day who appear to have believed it. The power

of the dark old god, rooted no doubt in instinctive fear, is hard to shake, and a

great many Christian writers, though possessing the brightest hopes of “Life

Hereafter” cannot, it seems, accept the abolition of death. “The valley of the

shadow,” “Death’s gloomy portal,” “the bitter pains of death,” and a thousand

other expressions all bear witness to the fact that a vast number of Christians

do not really believe what Christ said. Probably the greatest offender is John

Bunyan, writing in his PILGRIM’S PROGRESS of the icy river through which

the pilgrims must pass before they reach the Celestial City. Thousands,

possibly millions, must have been influenced in their impressionable years by


reading PILGRIM’S PROGRESS. Yet the “icy river” is entirely a product of

Bunyan’s own fears, and the New Testament will be searched in vain for the

slightest endorsement of his idea. To “sleep in Christ,” “to depart and be with

Christ,” “to fall asleep”—these are the expressions the New Testament uses.

It is high time the “icy river,” “the gloomy portal,” “the bitter pains,” and all the

rest of the melancholy images were brought face to face with the fact: “Jesus

Christ hath abolished death.” The fact seems to many to be too good to be

true. But if it does seem so, it is because we have not really accepted the

revolutionary character of God’s personal entry into the world. Once it dawns

upon us that God (incredible as it may well sound) has actually identified

Himself with Man, that He has taken the initiative in effecting the necessary

Reconciliation of Man with Himself, and has shown the way by which little

human personalities can begin to embark on that immense adventure of Living

of which God is the Centre, death—the discarding of a temporary machine

adapted only for a temporary stage—may begin to seem negligible.

We have so far spoken only of “death” as it affects the man whose inner

confidence is in Christ, His Character, His Values, and above all His claim to

be the expressed character of the Inexpressible God. There is no brightly

cheerful note in either the Gospels or the rest of the New Testament for those

whose real inward trust is in their own capabilities or in the schemes and

values of the present world-system. It is (as St. Paul insists almost _ad

nauseam_) only “IN” Christ, “IN” the Representative Man who was also God,

that death can be safely ignored and “Heaven” confidently welcomed. We

have no reason to suppose that death is anything but a disaster to those who

have no grip on the timeless Life of God.

THEORY INTO PRACTICE

If a man accepts the fact that the Character of God is focused in Christ, if he

accepts as true the Act of Reconciliation and the Demonstration with Death;


and if he himself is willing to abandon self-centred living and follow the way of

real living which Christ both demonstrated and taught, he is still not out of the

wood. For he finds that apart from exceptional effort or spasmodic resolution,

he is not spiritually robust enough to live life on the new level. He simply has

not got it in him to live for long as a pioneer of the new humanity. He can see

that it is right, and he can desire, even passionately, to follow the new way,

but in actual practice he does not achieve this new quality of living. He may

blame his own past, he may blame the ever-present effect of the God-ignoring

world in which he has to live, he may even reach the melancholy conclusion

that it is all a beautiful theory but that it cannot be worked in practice.

This very natural impasse was, of course, anticipated by Christ. He knew very

well, for example, that the followers of His own day would very quickly

collapse when the support and inspiration of His own personality were

removed by death. He therefore promised them a new Spirit who should

provide them with all the courage, moral reinforcement, love, patience,

endurance and other qualities which they would need. A fair reading of the

New Testament writings apart from the four Gospels shows plainly enough

that this promise was implemented. Ordinary people were not only “converted”

from their previous self-loving attitude, but received sufficient spiritual vitality

to cause no little stir among the world in which they lived. It is a mistake to

think that in general the receiving of this gift led to excitable demonstration. Its

normal function was to produce in human life the qualities which Paul

catalogues in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity,

fidelity, adaptability, and self-control. These are in fact the very qualities which

men so easily “run short of,” and which, taken together, comprise a character

corresponding to the Representative Man, Christ Himself.

It is this invasion of human life by something (or Someone) from outside which

the modern mind finds difficult to accept. We are all “conditioned” by the

modern outlook, which regards the whole of life as a closed system. A great

many things may happen inside that system, but it is unthinkable that the


whole huge cause-and-effect process should in any way be interfered with

from “outside.”

But when we suppose, even only for the sake of argument, that the teaching

of Christ is true—that this little life is acted against an immeasurable back-

cloth of timeless existence—it does not appear in the least impossible that

under certain conditions of harmony between THIS faulty existence and THAT

Perfection of Life, contact might be established. The result would be, to us, in

the literal sense, supernatural. Indeed, we have already seen that a man may,

even accidentally, come upon something of beauty, truth, goodness, or love,

and find the “other end” is connected with the Permanent. At such times the

closed-system idea is quite plainly inadequate.

Now we may wish, especially if we are more than a little tired of the closed-

system idea and faintly but definitely conscious of the Real World, that these

invasions might be more frequent or more demonstrable. Nevertheless, this

much we do know, and can reasonably expect, that if a man honestly wants to

follow the way of Christ and, as it were, opens his own personality to God, he

will without any doubt receive something of the Spirit of God. As his own

capacity grows and as his own channel of communication widens he will

receive more. John goes so far as to call this the receiving of God’s own

heredity (1John 3:9). This does not, of course, turn a man into a spiritualist

medium! The man’s own real self is purified and heightened, and though he

will come to bear a strong family likeness to Christ, he will, paradoxically

enough, be more “himself” than he was before.

We may here point out the great difference that has come to exist between the

Christianity of the early days and that of today. To us it has become a

performance, a keeping of rules, while to the men of those days it was, plainly,

an invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. The difference is

due surely to the fact that we are so very slow (even though we realize our

impotence) to discard the closed-system idea. We have so little of what the


New Testament calls “faith.” And since it is fairly obvious that “faith” is the first

requisite in making contact between this and the Permanent World, we can

scarcely wonder at the enormous difference in quality between first-century

and twentieth-century Christianity.

Without a power from outside, the teaching of Christ remains a beautiful idea,

tantalizing but unattainable. With the closed-system sooner or later you have

to say: “You can’t change human nature.” Ideals fail for very spiritual poverty,

and cynicism and despair take their place. But the fact of Christ’s coming is

itself a shattering denial of the closed-system idea which dominates our

thinking. And what else is His continual advice to “have faith in God” but a call

to refuse, despite all appearances, to be taken in by the closed-system type of

thinking? “Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall

be opened unto you”—what are these famous words but an invitation to reach

out for the Permanent and the Real? If we want to co-operate, the Spirit is

immediately available. “If ye then, for all your evil, know how to give good gifts

unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy

Spirit to them that ask Him?”

SUMMARY

It is perhaps possible now to make a summary of the basic truths of our

existence on this planet (and beyond) which can be honestly commended to

meet both the facts of the situation as we can observe them, and the deep

needs of the human spirit.

We can never have too big a conception of God, and the more scientific

knowledge (in whatever field) advances, the greater becomes our idea of His

vast and complicated wisdom. Yet, unless we are to remain befogged and

bewildered and give up all hope of ever knowing God as a Person, we have to

accept His own planned focusing of Himself into a human being, Jesus Christ.


If we accept this as fact, as THE Fact of history, it becomes possible to find a

satisfactory and comprehensive answer to a great many problems, and, what

is equally important, a reasonable “shelf” on which the unsolved perplexities

may be left with every confidence.

The “way in” to this faith is partly intellectual and partly a matter of moral

commitment. The diagnosis of the world’s sickness (and, therefore, of the

individuals who comprise the world) is that the power to love has been

wrongly directed. It has either been turned in upon itself or given to the wrong

things. The outward symptoms, and the results, of this misdirection are plainly

obvious (at least in other people) in what we call “sin” or “selfishness.” The

drastic “conversion” which God-become-Man called for is the reversal of the

wrong attitude, the deliberate giving of the whole power to love, first to God,

and then to other people. Without this reversal He spoke quite bluntly of a

world doomed to destruction. Where it genuinely takes place He spoke plainly

of men being able to “know” God, to begin in a new quality of living which

physical death is powerless to touch. The three problems which this raises, (a)

the question of _rapprochement_ between the morally infected man and the

Goodness of God which is automatically fatal to evil, (b) the question as to

whether life really does continue after physical death, and (c) the question as

to how men, even if they wish to live life on the new level, can find the power

to do so—Christ solved by three demonstrations, as we have seen above. So

far we move intellectually, but we must repeat what was said in a previous

chapter, that the truth of this extra-human solution to the world’s impasse only

comes alive when it is acted upon. The armchair critic must leave his arm-

chair if he is to join the number of those who become convinced that here is

Truth.

It appears that the strategy of Christ was to win the loyalty of the few who

would honestly respond to the new way of living. They would be the pioneers

of the new order, the spearhead of advance against the massed ignorance,

selfishness, evil, “play-acting,” and apathy of the majority of the human race.


The goal which was set before them, for which they were to work and pray—

and if need be, suffer and die—was the building of a new Kingdom of inner

supreme loyalty, the Kingdom of God. This was to transcend every barrier of

race and frontier and—and this is important—of time and space as well.

The “Church,” which became the name of the spearhead, has been, and is,

open to a good deal of criticism, but it has made a great deal of hard-won

progress. It is at any rate trying to carry out the divine plan, and in so far as it

is working along the lines of real Truth and real Love it cannot, of course,

fail—any more than God can cease to exist.

In the optimistic mid-periods between world wars some Christians talk brightly

of “the earth being filled with the Knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover

the sea” and of “the Kingdoms of this world becoming the Kingdom of our God

and of His Christ”—as though the world-wide acceptance of the reign of God

were just round the corner. This is, of course, nonsense. Those who respond

to the Truth have always been a minority, and when God visited the earth in

Person the response, even to Him, was not very large. Indeed it would appear

that Christ (knowing how firmly evil and selfishness are entrenched and how

hard it is for men to break away from their own self-love) did not anticipate a

full-scale establishing of God’s Kingdom on this planet even by the time when

a halt was called to the experiment which we call Life (e.g. see Luke 18:8) The

follower of the new way is therefore called to do all he can to spread “the good

news of the Kingdom,” but to realize at all times that the success or failure of

the Kingdom can never be judged by simple reference to statistics of

“Christians” at any particular time. The Kingdom is rooted in Real Life (what

we sometimes call “eternity”), and as time goes on the number of those,

belonging to it and taking part in its activities, but who have passed FROM the

space-and-time set-up, will naturally exceed more and more the number of

active members existing at any particular moment in the present world.


Critics often complain that if the world is in its present state after nineteen

centuries of Christianity, then it cannot be a very good religion. They make

two ridiculous mistakes. In the first place Christianity—the real thing—has

never been accepted on a large scale and has therefore never been in a

position to control “the state of the world,” though its influence has been far

from negligible. And in the second place they misunderstand the nature of

Christianity. It is not to be judged by its success or failure to reform the world

which rejects it. If it failed WHERE IT IS ACCEPTED there might be grounds

for complaint, but it does not so fail. It is a revelation of the true way of living,

the way to know God, the way to live life of eternal quality, and is not to be

regarded as a handy social instrument for reducing juvenile delinquency or the

divorce rate. Any “religion,” provided it can be accepted by the majority of

people, can exert that sort of restrictive pressure. The religion of Jesus Christ

changes people (if they are willing to pay the price of being changed) so that

they quite naturally and normally live as “sons and daughters of God,” and of

course they exert an excellent influence on the community. But if real

Christianity fails, it fails for the same reasons that Christ failed—and any

condemnation rightly falls on the world which rejects both Him and it.

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YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL - thecommonlife.com · Your God Is Too Small J.B.Phillips No one is ever really at ease in facing what we call “life” and “death” without a religious